


File 1: Code Veronica X

by Q_Alias



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Game: Resident Evil CODE: Veronica, No Smut, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:48:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 41
Words: 62,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23666404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Q_Alias/pseuds/Q_Alias
Summary: Grayson Harman returns to Rockfort Island to resume his duties as the Ashford's butler, now that his father, Scott Harman, has effectively retired from the position. But Grayson finds that life, though it does go on, doesn't get any easier, and that trouble lingers like an unfriendly stranger. And then, Rockfort is attacked.
Relationships: Alexia Ashford/Original Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	1. Prologue

Raccoon City had made him lose his appetite for steak—or any kind of meat, really. Grayson couldn’t even look at hamburger without feeling a little sick.

“You haven’t eaten anything,” Alfred remarked, eating his steak with the preciseness of someone who reveled in pointless dinner etiquette. “Nothing but the bloody salad. And a roll.”

It was a quiet night on Rockfort Island, excluding the lilting static of Shostakovich on Alfred’s ancient gramophone, which, at some point in the past, had belonged to his grandfather. Alfred always listened to Shostakovich at dinner. His life had become, since his diagnosis, a necessary continuum of routines and rituals.

“Raccoon kinda made me an involuntary vegetarian, I guess,” Grayson said, wrinkling his nose and pushing away his plate. “You ever seen someone’s guts, man? Intestines, they look like raw sausage.”

“You’re still on about Raccoon?”

“‘Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do’,” he recited, frowning. Then, “I’m not even sure I’m remembering it right. How things went.”

Alfred stared, sipped his wine. Listening.

“You go through all that trauma? Shit blurs together. But the bits and pieces you do remember? Vivid.” Grayson paused. “Too vivid. I still have nightmares.”

“Grow some bloody balls,” Alfred suggested, helpfully.

“At least I got balls,” Grayson shot back, and smiled. “Still rocking that prepubescent falsetto, my friend. Like someone’s got your scrotum in a vice.”

Alfred snorted. “You’re lucky I like you, Grayson.”

He agreed; Alfred killed the people he didn’t like.

* * *

The thing that scared him more than the future was the fact he couldn’t remember much of anything—or, rather, he couldn't remember exactly how things went—in Raccoon City. It was like playing The Telephone Game by himself.

Grayson lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. His television hissed, static boiling in the screen; his movie had ended some time ago, but he hadn’t ejected the tape yet.His luggage, though it had been weeks since he’d arrived on Rockfort, still hadn’t been entirely unpacked. And the empty bottles still hadn’t been cleared away.

He passed the days cleaning everywhere but his room, and thinking about how much he missed his old life in Raccoon City. He thought about how much he’d liked being a cop, and how useless he’d been as a cop. Sometimes he still thought about joining the USS, but remembered it was Umbrella who’d shit on his life, and so the desire passed. He was only here because of Alfred, and because of his dad, who was far away now, recovering from another stroke in some New York hospital, under the care of the best cardiologists that Alfred’s money could buy.

In the hot, dusty attic, which looked like a room in a Hammer Film prop-house, Grayson sorted things into cardboard boxes—antiques and books that Alfred had shipped from Antarctica, but had never bothered to organize. He found a battered, yellowing copy of the 1973 Guinness Book of World Records, several faded Magnavox Odyssey overlays, a dusty 1981 IBM PC that had belonged to Alexia, wrapped in a sheet of grubby bubble-wrap. He thought about hooking the computer up, but figured it probably didn’t work anymore, so he put it in the box he’d marked ELECTRONIC RECYCLABLES.

Somewhere, a clock ticked. The house groaned as if it was in pain.

Nighttime was always a gamble when it came to Alfred’s precarious mental state. Some nights, Alfred thought he was Alexia, and he’d play out his elaborate cabaret with her psychotic caricature as its star. Other nights, he was Alfred, and Alfred remembered Alexia was dead, and those were the nights Grayson liked best.

Tonight, thankfully, was the latter; Alfred had gone to bed early, after his ritual nightcap. There wouldn’t be any screaming and shattering of mirrors and drinking glasses, and wine-stains on the fleur-de-lis wallpaper and Persian carpets when Grayson, inevitably, rebuffed Alexia’s advances. He’d suggested to Alfred that it was probably a good idea to follow the regimen of meds he’d been prescribed by his doctor, but Alfred had just laughed his trill, effeminate laugh, and said he didn’t need _t_ _hose_ _funny pills…_ Then, later, he’d lost his temper and shot one of the gardeners.


	2. Subconscious Turmoil

Grayson hated being alone, because it was when he was alone that his thoughts drifted to bad places, to the what-ifs and why-didn't-Is of his life. And it always happened just as he was falling asleep to Air Supply singing "Sweet Dreams" in his ears, because that was his ritual drinking song, and he'd just finished a bottle of Alfred's good scotch…

1982 had been a good year, because he'd told Alexia that he liked her, and she'd told him that she liked him, too. They had started dating in that clumsy teenage way, neither of them brave enough to go beyond holding hands and awkward-kissing.

It had been a stark contrast to the easiness in which he'd dated Jill, then Annette.

_Annette._

His chest tightened.

He took off his headphones and rolled them around his Walkman, and stared at the ceiling.

Grayson had known, back then, and with a clenched certainty, that something bad was going to happen in Raccoon City. He'd known that, and now Annette was dead, and Sherry was somewhere far away, or maybe even dead too.

If he'd been more proactive, Grayson told himself, he could have gotten Annette and Sherry out of Raccoon City before the outbreak had happened. Sherry would have been starting eighth grade by now, and Annette would have been starting her career as a professor of microbiology at a good university. And he would have started working as a cop again, maybe written a crime-thriller or two, or an account about his experience in Raccoon City.

It would have been a good life, he thought.

Alexia, upon graduating Oxford, had been offered a professorship there. But she'd turned it down to work at Umbrella. She, unlike Annette, had never been interested in teaching, and she'd never been very good at it anyway. Alexia had been one of those people who knew their stuff so well that it had become second-nature to her, an unconscious gesture, and so she couldn't elucidate very well to people like him, whose comprehension came slower, more reluctantly, and sometimes not at all.

 _She's on ice_ , something with Ada's voice said.

Grayson frowned. Cryogenics was quack-science; Annette had told him that.

He heard Alfred shriek, the tinkling of breaking glass, hurried footsteps in the hallway.

Grayson braced himself.

"Grayson!" Alfred said, in his approximation of what he thought Alexia sounded like. He started tussling with the door, wanting to open it.

Most nights, if Grayson ignored Alfred long enough, he'd go away; but tonight he seemed particularly aggressive. He was bigger than Alfred, but the psychosis gave Alfred freak-strength, made him unpredictable in the level of violence he was willing to employ to get what he wanted. Once, Alfred had even tried to shoot him, because, in his mind at the time, he was Alexia, and Alexia was a jealous lover.

Sliding off his bed, Grayson walked to the door, took a deep breath, and unlocked it, against his better judgment.

Though he'd seen Alfred in Alexia-drag before, Grayson had never quite gotten used to how much he looked like her. There had even been nights he'd nearly convinced himself to go with it, to fuck Alfred like he would have fucked Alexia as an adult, because loneliness and isolation did funny shit to a person's head, and the alcohol didn't help either. But then Grayson remembered it was Alfred under the make-up and the wig, and the beautiful dresses, and any thoughts he'd entertained of fucking him had gone cold and flaccid.

"You're gonna break my door," he said.

Alfred smiled his Alexia-smile, and the confidence it exuded struck him, because Alfred's real smiles were hollow, mimetic things."I wanted to ensure your room was empty."

"I don't have any women in here," he said, reassuringly. "It's just me, scotch, and an Air Supply cassette."

"You smell like a bloody keg."

"I finished the whole bottle."

Alfred jostled past, looked around the room. Once he'd confirmed that there weren't, in fact, any women hiding in there, Alfred turned to him and smiled suggestively.

"I've got whiskey-dick," Grayson said, bluntly.

"You're so crass, Grayson."

"I'm plastered. You mind if I sleep?"

"Right, you'll need to be up bright and early for your chores," Alfred said, and squeezed his bicep. "Need to keep up these muscles, don't you? All that heavy-lifting."

"Yeah, lots of heavy-lifting. Good night, Alexia."

"I'll go bother my dear brother, I suppose. Good night, Grayson."

He shut the door, then went back to his bed and slept.

The lights of the Raccoon City radio-tower winked in the cage of his window like a constellation of dying stars, and the sky was indigo velvet, fleeced with pink-gold clouds.

Annette was wearing her lab-coat, and she still smelled of antiseptic and chemicals. She was smoking a cigarette, the cherry glowing in the twilit darkness of his apartment, pinpricks of molten light catching in her eyes each time she inhaled. A warm wind blew through his open window, and carried with it the smell of summer, of barbecues and freshly cut grass.

"I miss you," was the first thing he said.

"I know," she said, and blew a cloud of smoke outside. "I miss you, too."

"I was listening to Air Supply," he told her, stupidly. "I hate you for getting me into them."

Annette smiled. He missed that smile. "Guilty pleasure, sorry," she said, and finished her cigarette, putting it out in a heaped ash-tray on the windowsill.

"I could have done more," he said.

"You could have," Annette agreed. "But we all make decisions."

He nodded, and said nothing.

"You're like those guys in the Middle-Ages, the ones who whip themselves," Annette said, and stood up, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her lab coat.

"I just keep thinking about all things I could have done different..."

"Hindsight is 20-20," Annette said, and walked toward him. But she never seemed to get any closer, like she was walking on a treadmill. "You still have Alexia."

"You told me cryogenics is quack-science."

Annette shrugged.

"Wong was lying."

"Have you asked Alfred?"

Grayson woke suddenly, feeling an intense, inexplicable dread which lingered under his skin like a substrate of something that wasn't quite ice. He became aware of the tears cooling in his eyes, and wiped them away.

He lay back down, listening to the dull hiss of the ocean, the chirping of insects, the creaking of the house. It was quiet, which meant Alfred had probably passed out, and that was good.

Closing his eyes, Grayson slept, and dreamed of nothing.


	3. The Old Days

Grayson had transcribed several Beta tapes of the twins and himself to VHS cassettes, and on rainy days, when there was nothing to do outside, and only after he'd finished his inside chores to Alfred's satisfaction, he would watch them.

Seeing Alexia again, exactly as Grayson remembered her, comforted him, and the act of reliving those memories, memories completely removed from Annette and Raccoon City, helped him cope, distracted him from the sadness he felt, deep down—like a dead thing festering in his gut.

"How many times do I have to tell you, Grayson?" twelve-year-old Alexia said, staring at him from the past. She was wearing a lab coat that was too big for her, and a black jumper dress. "Get that bloody camera out of my laboratory."

The camera turned, a tanned face filling the screen. At fourteen-years-old, he'd been a big kid, tall and awkward, dressed in stonewashed denim.

"There you have it, ladies and gentlemen," fourteen-year-old him said to his nonexistent audience, in a bad imitation of David Attenborough. "The rare and exotic Alexia Ashford, a subterranean species of ape known for its aggressiveness." The camera turned around again, on Alexia, and she stared into it like an annoyed mother. "As you can see, the Alexia Ashford is preparing to attack. See how it scowls and taps its pen on the table as a warning to would-be predators?"

"Grayson, I bloody swear, you have five seconds to drop the Attenborough act, or I drop your camera."

"You're cute when you're mad," he said.

Alexia gave a frustrated sigh. "You must have been dropped on your head one too many times as a baby," she said, and swiveled her stool around, peering into a high-powered microscope.

The lab looked like the labs in NEST, all medical tile and stainless steel. It had been somewhere in the Antarctica facility, Grayson remembered, near the bottom. Three cylindrical tanks, each one filled with sand, and ants of some large South American variant, stood in a row behind Alexia.

"Probably," he agreed, and the camera bobbed as he walked over, focusing on the papers—photo-copied images of ants, and Alexia's hastily handwritten notes—spread out on her desk. "What's this stuff?"

She pushed the camera away. "My research," she said.

"Man, you're prickly today, Lex."

"Because I have a Yank stomping around my bloody lab, taking pictures of everything," she said, frowning. "God, I wish Alfred never bought you that Betacam."

"If you really want me to go, I will."

Alexia sighed, rubbed her face. She looked tired. "No, no. I know you're trying to make me feel better about father," she said, and looked at him. And smiled, genuinely.

"I'm sure Alexander will come back," Grayson said.

Something strange, then, in Alexia's expression. "Right," she said.

They had never found Alexander. Sometimes, on the rare occasions he accompanied Alfred down there, Grayson searched for Alexander among the Rockfort prisoners, even if it was unlikely he'd find him there. After the shit Grayson had witnessed in Raccoon City, it was more than likely Alexander had known something Umbrella didn't want him to know, or had had something the company wanted, and so they had shot him, made the evidence vanish. Just like they'd done to William Birkin.

He ejected the cassette, fed another to the VCR.

Back when he'd been a kid, Grayson had idolized David Lynch, Kubrick, and all the other weird experimentalists of the time. He'd wanted to write screenplays, direct his own movies, and that obsession had often manifested in short films he'd directed, using the Betacam Alfred had bought him. This particular video had been one of those short films; he'd been on an experimental kick, and he'd asked the twins to help him with it. It involved the twins plucking the wings off a still-living dragonfly, then dropping it into a tank of Alexia's ants, set to a tinkling berceuse, which he'd recorded off the twins' antique Swiss music-box.

Alfred had loved it, for some reason, and he'd asked him to make copies. Grayson, looking back at it now, saw it as pretentious film-salad.

A wedge of light spilled across his carpet. "Grayson?"

Startled, Grayson looked over, saw Alfred standing in the doorway. "You scared the shit outta me," he said. "Knock, would you?"

"I'm… hungry," Alfred said.

What Alfred wanted to really say, Grayson knew, was that he was lonely. But Alfred was too proud to say anything like that aloud, at least not while sober. "What did you wanna eat?" he asked, politely.

Alfred said nothing. He sat beside him on the bed, the coil-springs creaking under his weight, and watched the television. "I like this little film."

"I know," he said.

"Alexia would have been a beautiful woman."

"Yeah," Grayson said, and nodded. He thought about his dream. Ask Alfred, Annette told him, in his head. Grayson tried, but couldn't bring himself to do it.

How did someone broach that kind of topic anyway, he wondered. _Hey, I hear your dead sister's in cryo, like Walt Disney. You know anything about that_?

"You don't mind if I sit here for a while, Grayson?"

Grayson slid him arm across Alfred's shoulders. "Nah," he said.

Alfred nodded, crossed his arms.

"You got something you wanna say, Alfred?"

"No," Alfred said, and shook his head, staring at the television. The clip ended, and he asked, "Do you mind rewinding it?"

Grayson got up and walked over to the television, and thumbed the rewind button on the VCR. The dragonfly flew back into Alfred's hands and was whole again, and Alexia was backing up toward the false-window, which had overlooked the hydroponic yard of the underground mansion. He hit play, then sat beside Alfred again.

"I haven't been back to the Antarctica facility in years," Alfred said, frowning.

"Why would you wanna? Cold, nothing to do."

"The workers there aren't happy with me," Alfred told him.

"Nobody liked Alexia either, when she was the boss there," Grayson said, and paused. Is Alexia alive, Alfred? Is she in deep-freeze?

"I'm constantly receiving e-mails whinging about 'terrible working conditions', and 'vacations', and all this other rubbish." Alfred pursed his lips, tensed slightly. "I'm not Alexia," he confessed, as if that was some deep, dark secret. "I'm not good at running the show."

"Alexia was one-of-a-kind," Grayson said.

"She was," Alfred agreed.

"Is she alive, Alfred?"

Alfred stared at him as if he'd grown a second head.

Grayson regretted saying anything at all, and rubbed the back of his neck, sheepish.

"Alexia's dead, Grayson," Alfred said, evenly. "She's been dead for fifteen years. My dear sister..." He trailed off and gazed sadly at the television. The dragonfly, wingless and dying, wriggled in the tank, and the ants converged on it, eating.

"I met this woman in Raccoon City. Ada Wong?"

"I don't know the name," Alfred said. "She told you Alexia was alive?"

"Yeah." He'd sold Annette out for that lie, and Grayson hated himself for it.

"She was lying, Grayson."

"Yeah, I kinda figured," he said.

"But," Alfred said, and stood up, "what did she say exactly?"

Grayson shook his head. "It was stupid."

Alfred's mouth became a thin, hard line.

"Something about cryogenics. It was dumb, Alfred."


	4. Mum's the Word

Alexia had been fascinated with cryogenics ("Cryonics", she'd corrected him. "Cryogenics is an umbrella term"). She had, after much trial and error, managed to preserve the tissue of a rat, then revive it from cryo, and had replicated the experiment with bigger, more complex organisms, like pigs and rabbits.

She'd spent nights shuttered away in her laboratory, perfecting her methods, obsessively detailing every step, every variable, every result. Occasionally, Grayson had found Alexia sleeping at her desk in the laboratory annex, which had served as her office, papers, floppies, and notebooks strewn across the baize, her computer idling, bright lattices of data burning steadily on the CRT monitor, displaying a language of ominous directories and nerd jargon.

One of his most vivid memories from that time was a box Alexia had built, like a tiny refrigerator without any shelves, and in that box had been a piglet, perfectly preserved, its glassy eyes staring at nothing. She'd wired up the box to several computers, and some kind of cooling unit that consisted of canisters which contained liquid nitrogen, and a large, heavily-modified battery.

Alexia had tried explaining to him the magnetocaloric effect and how she'd applied it to her box, but he hadn't understood it, and she'd sighed and shaken her head. It had been hard on Alexia, Grayson knew; she was like an alien whose species had already developed interstellar travel, while everyone else could barely fly to the moon.

He looked out his window, Air Supply singing _Sweet Dreams_ in his ears. Rain tinkled against the glass, and the sea churned and frothed, and looked like melted lead simmering under the dark gray sky. A cyclone warning had been issued; Cyclone Martin had already hit French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, and was heading straight for Rockfort. But the forecast expected the storm to significantly weaken by then, or to altogether change its course, so he wasn't worried, and neither was Alfred.

Grayson put his headphones around his neck and kicked away several empty bottles, then left his room and took a long, urgent piss in the bathroom, washing his hands in the ancient pedestal sink with a bar of French-milled soap. He stared at himself in the spotty mirror: dark crescents under his eyes, and he looked older than he remembered, like the President on the final leg of his term.

Grayson ran his fingers through the thick stubble on his face, which had a sprinkling of gray in it now, and reminded himself to shave later. Splashing his face a few times with lukewarm water, he left the bathroom and went to the linen closet, and took out the vacuum. He figured he should do some work, before Alfred accused him of slacking off.

Grayson was vacuuming in the hallway, just outside Alfred's bedroom, when he heard him talking to himself. Or, rather, Alfred was talking to Alexia. He turned off the vacuum and started to dust instead, listening. For good measure, he put on his headphones, but didn't play any music.

"I just don't get why Grayson is the way he is, brother," he heard Alexia said.

"He's going through a hard time, dear sister," Alfred said, mildly. "A small rough patch, you know?"

Grayson wiped the porcelain face of an antique doll the size of a small child, its expression that of a lobotomized Victorian girl.

"It's been over a month since Raccoon City, brother. He hasn't touched me at all since he's come back to Rockfort, and it's starting to make me suspicious."

"Suspicious, Alexia?"

"Remember that woman you'd found him with? The female guard?"

"She's dead, Alexia. I killed her myself."

"But there are other female guards, Alfred. Grayson's such a handsome man."

"He looks like a Greek," Alfred said derisively, as if that was some kind of insult. "Besides, Grayson never leaves the mansion, Alexia. Not by himself."

"You almost sound jealous, brother." A pause, the sound of footsteps slowly pacing the room. "I know you don't like to share my attention, but you must understand that I love him, Alfred."

Grayson dusted a flower vase, an oil painting of a landscape. Several cardboard boxes cluttered the hallway, each one containing books, sheaves of yellowing paper and microfiche. He started organizing the boxes, stacking them neatly against the wall.

"I know you do, Alexia, and I want nothing more than for you to be happy. But I—"

"Enough, Alfred. This pouting is unbecoming of you."

"My apologies, Alexia."

"Do you still remember what I asked of you?"

"Yes, Alexia. I remember."

"That's a good soldier, Alfred."

Grayson frowned. He wanted to know what Alexia had asked him.

Alfred was rummaging around his room, mumbling to himself. Grayson was just about to leave when the door opened, and Alfred stood there, puzzled. "What are you doing?" he asked, testily.

Grayson pretended to turn off his Walkman, and took off his headphones, putting on his best apologetic smile. "Sorry, didn't mean to wake you up if you were napping, Alfred," he said, closing a box labeled TEXTBOOKS and setting it aside. "I was just sorting the stuff in the hallway. You should really sell some of it, man. You're never gonna use any of it."

"I don't want to sell any of it," Alfred said.

"I'm just saying."

"Is dinner going to be ready soon, Grayson?"

"Sure," Grayson said, and nodded, "what did you want?"

"Surprise me. I need to go down to The Palace and sort some things." He patted Grayson's shoulder, then walked off. He heard a door open and shut, and then it was quiet again, excluding the rattle of the pipes in the walls.

He packed away the vacuum, showered, changed clothes, and went to prepare dinner.

Dinner was New England clam chowder, a side of sourdough rolls, and wine. Grayson passed the time waiting for Alfred with a book, a battered copy of _Lord of the Rings_ he'd had since he was a kid. It had been Alexia's—she'd loved Tolkien—and her notes and highlights were still in the book, which Grayson liked, because, for a few moments, or as long as his suspension of disbelief allowed him to, he could imagine she'd never gone anywhere.

Alfred came into the dining room, shaking the rain from his thin coat and hanging it on the stand by the door. "Good evening," he said, and sat down.

Grayson closed the book and laid it on the table. "Evening," he replied.

Alfred looked at the book. "Lord of the Rings? Alexia loved those books."

"She did," Grayson agreed, and stood up. He started dishing out the food, ladling chowder into Alfred's bowl, then pouring wine into his glass. Then he cranked the gramophone, and Shostakovich's _Symphony No. 5_ filled the dining room like a war scene from a silent film.

Alfred spooned a lump of potato into his mouth. He looked tired.

"You look like shit," Grayson pointed out, and sat down again, tucking into his own food.

"Spencer," Alfred said, and dabbed his mouth with a napkin.

"What about him?"

"Budget rubbish."

"Well," Grayson said, and tore off a chunk of sourdough with his teeth, "maybe you should stop buying military paraphernalia on the company's dime."

"That money is as much mine as Spencer's, Grayson."

"I'm just saying, if you don't want to get your ass reamed over expenditures, then maybe stop having so many expenditures." Grayson dipped his roll into his chowder and scarfed it down. He hadn't realized how hungry he'd been; this had been the first thing he'd eaten all day, besides the beer, and a couple packets of saltines. "That said," he continued, and sipped his wine, "I'm surprised Spencer contacted you."

"This Raccoon City business has the company in a froth," Alfred said, frowning. "Everyone's getting raked over the bloody coals. Including me, it seems."

"Hey, Alfred," Grayson said suddenly, and looked at him. "What did Alexia tell you? Back when we were kids. I dunno why, but I just remembered something about that."

"I don't know what you're waffling on about, Grayson. Eat your supper."

"You're keeping something from me."

Alfred said nothing. But it was the bad kind of quiet, the sort which usually preluded storms.

"What did Alexia say to you?"

The storm happened. Alfred stood up, swiped his food off the table, then pulled the antique Walther on his hip, which he carried when his bolt-action wasn't practical, and pointed it at him.

Grayson put his hands up, pacific. "Sorry," he said, staring at the gun.

Alfred kept the gun on him for several moments. Then holstered it, said, "The safety was on," and left the dining room.

He looked at the clam chowder and wine splattered on the carpet and table, and sighed.


	5. December 28th

Rain splashed on the window, and the lights flickered.

Grayson kept a flashlight nearby, just in case, and sipped coffee, riffling through papers and folders Alfred kept in his desk and filing cabinet, in his study.

He found nothing of interest. Mostly bank statements, invoices, day planners, catalogs, receipts, quarterly earning reports, internal circular letters from Umbrella HQ dating all the way back to 1993. But nothing about Alexia. He sighed, ran his fingers back through his hair. _What did you tell him, Lex?_

“Probably keeps shit in his office,” he muttered to himself, stacking the papers and folders, and putting them away. Alfred wouldn’t notice; if the state of his drawers and filing cabinets were any indication, the guy hadn’t checked them in months, maybe years.

He rubbed his chin, then took the handset off the cradle of a black Bakelite rotary and dialed an extension. “Mr. Dorson? Yeah, it’s Grayson Harman. Lord Ashford there?” He licked his lips, listening. Then, “No? Okay, thanks. Do you know when he’ll be back?” He paused, listening to Dorson rambling about a meeting, something about Alfred not wanting to be disturbed, and how he wouldn’t be back for an hour or so, at least. “Okay,” Grayson said, once the secretary finished, “thanks.” He hung up.

That gave him enough time to get into Alfred’s office, then out, and back to the mansion before Alfred was any the wiser. His biggest problem was Dorson; he’d been sucking up to Alfred ever since he’d made the mistake of asking about Alexia, and would probably rat him out, if it meant a shot at Alfred’s good side. Grayson doubted Alfred would do much more than yell at him, but that was a headache he didn't need. And still, there was always that slight chance Alfred would completely loose his shit and kill him.

He grabbed his flashlight and made his way down the three flights of stairs, the steps creaking under his weight, and out of the mansion. Rain pattered around him, warm and unpleasant in its humidity, and he crossed the bridge connecting the mansion to the administrative building, which everyone called The Palace, because it looked like Versailles in miniature.

Thumbing the button on the wall, the antique clock released, slid aside on its magnetic track, and he stepped into Alfred’s office.

The office was like any office he’d ever been in, down to the cheap blue carpet, which he’d seen in a dozen different waiting rooms. But the furniture, unlike those waiting rooms, was expensive. A large window overlooked the sea, and in front of that window stood Alfred’s desk, and his computer.

Alfred had never been a very technical guy, and viewed his computer as a necessary evil. Unlike Alexia. Alexia had loved technology. She’d kept an impressive collection of catalogs, manuals, books, and magazines about technology, because she liked to know how things worked, and what was going on in the electronic world. She’d always been very adamant about her work being on the cutting-edge, which in reality had given her a leg-up over her co-workers, who had been born in an age where computers had been as big as rooms, only understood by post-war cabals of Washington technofetishists, or had not been a thing at all.

Reflexively, Grayson glanced at the door, then sat at Alfred’s desk. His computer was on. A screensaver looped a crude 3-D Umbrella logo, rotating forever, against a flat black background. He touched the mouse. The screensaver went away, revealing a login screen.

“Shit,” he muttered, setting his flashlight, bulb-down, on the desk. Quietly, Grayson started to pull open drawers. Alfred wasn’t a technical guy; he’d probably written his password down.

 _Bingo._ He found a notepad, at the bottom of a drawer, underneath a layer of tape-rolls, staplers, and pens. Written on it, in Alfred’s painfully neat handwriting:

_Login AAshford@UmbrellaCorp.com_

_Password 1971_

“You would make your password your birthday,” Grayson said, and shook his head. He tapped out the credentials, and waited for the desktop to load.

He spent some time exploring, but couldn’t find anything concrete. Just a lot of curt e-mails, reports, copies of _Panzer General II_ and _Red Baron II_. But nothing about Alexia.

Clicking through Alfred’s inbox again, Grayson noticed something he’d missed before: Alfred had sent several e-mails to himself, then had put them in the trash, but had forgotten to delete them. Curiously, he opened one, and it read:

 _December 28_ _th_ _. D_ _o_ _n’t forget!_

That was the day Alexia had died. _How could e_ _ither of us forget_?

The door opened, startling him, and Robert Dorson poked his head inside the office. Dorson, in his argyle sweater-vest and ironed dickies, looked like the kind of guy who’d attended Cambridge, and had probably gotten top marks. He was English like Alfred, but that was where their similarities ended.

“Mr. Harman?” There was something in Dorson’s face that reminded him of a rat. “Lord Ashford didn’t mention you’d be by. Why are you at his desk?”

Grayson smiled, shrugging. “He’s got games on here, and I was bored,” he lied. Then, “How come you’re in here? This isn’t your office. Looking for information about Alexia?”

Dorson scrunched up his face as if he’d just caught a whiff of something very unpleasant, but he said nothing. Still, it was pretty clear he wasn’t buying it. Slowly, his gaze panned to the antique clock, and the hidden door it had once concealed. His eyebrows knit together, a crease in his forehead.

“I wouldn’t mention this to Alfred,” Grayson said, following his eyes to the doorway. “Be a shame if he found out you opened the passageway to the mansion, after breaking into his computer.”

The color, what little there was, drained from his face. “You wouldn’t—”

“I would,” Grayson said, and stood up. “But you walk away and pretend this never happened? Alfred will never know.”

“He’ll kill me,” Dorson said, swallowing hard.

“And what a shitty situation that would be,” Grayson said. “So don’t open your fucking mouth, asshole. Understand?” He stared, and Dorson nodded. “Good,” he said, “I’m glad we’re on the same page. Haul ass, Dorson, because if Alfred catches you here, he’s gonna put a bullet in your head. That said, you know anything ‘bout December 28th?”

The secretary shook his head.

“All the fucking eavesdropping you do, and you don’t know shit. Figures. Get outta my face.” Grayson watched Dorson leave, then sighed. “Alfred’s rubbing off on me,” he said to himself. “Shit.”


	6. A Lesson in Storms

Alexia had always been very meticulous about information. Though she’d loved computers, she had preferred things she could hold and touch, because information, when committed to paper, wasn’t prone to power-surges, to faulty hardware, to bugs in the programming or storage limitations. A person could write as much information as they wanted, provided they had enough notebooks, and in whatever format they pleased.

Grayson dug through boxes of her things, hoping that, somewhere at the bottom of some worn cardboard box, under the stuff and the yellowing wads of newspaper packing, he’d find something useful to his investigation. Riffling through those boxes, her lifetime spelled out in junk, Grayson found himself hurting. Books he remembered her reading; toys he remembered her playing with, before she’d decided she was too grown-up for toys; cassettes and records he remembered her listening to (the scratches on her vinyl of The Cure’s _Three Imaginary Boys_ reminded him of all the times they’d listened to it in her room, made him feel a sharp pang of hurt in his chest).

He found a barrette wrapped in tissue paper, worked in silver: a dragonfly studded with tiny rubies, and narrow, filigreed wings. Grayson had picked it out in a Westminster jewelry shop, and his father (with Alfred’s money, not that his father would ever admit that) had bought it, for Alexia’s graduation, and she’d loved it. She’d kissed him on the cheek, in front of his father and Alfred, and he’d felt like the luckiest kid in the world.

Grayson pocketed the dragonfly, then sat down, against the wall, and looked helplessly around him. Ziggurats of crumbling, bloated cardboard cluttered every inch of the room, and he’d only gotten through a quarter of the mess. He kicked away the box of things with his foot.

He shifted, feeling the rough hardwood through his thin jeans. He was sweating from the hot, dusty air: fat, oily beads of it dripping down his face and neck, steadily soaking the collar of his T-shirt. Even with the window open, he felt no relief; though it was raining, the temperature was somewhere north of ninety-five Fahrenheit, and the rain made the humidity unbearable—close and sticky, and unpleasantly lingering, like the air in a locker-room.

The lights flickered.

“Shit,” he said, and stood up, his knees cracking.

The wind gusted, rattling the window. The lights flickered again, then went out. The standby didn’t kick on, which meant it was probably out of gas. “Better check out the generator,” he mumbled.

The room was dark, though Grayson could still make out the faint square of the window, the jumbled shapes of boxes, the doorway. Thumbing the switch on his flashlight, he left the room, made his way down the three flights of staircases, then outside.

Wind snagged at his clothes and hair, tossing handfuls of rain into his face. _This was absolutely stupid_ , he thought. _But what do_ _es_ _it fucking matter anyway_? He stumbled around the house, bent to the wind, sliding on the slick flagstone and grass. His clothes were soaked, stuck to his skin like old bandages.

The standby was just around the corner, on the side of the house. He only needed to go a little further…

Grayson lurched suddenly, felt something slide, hot, through his stomach. He looked down, saw a thin piece of wood sticking out of his gut, blood flowering steadily through the fabric of his shirt. _Well, that’s not good_ , he thought, with a calmness that surprised him. _Must have come from a tree_...

He sagged, touching the barrette in his pocket, finding comfort in it. The wind hurled things across the yard: a wheelbarrow, more wood, a crowbar he’d forgotten to put away.

His stomach hurt. Really hurt. He wanted to vomit, but only dry-heaved instead. Consciousness left him in increments of blood, the red flower growing bigger, pooling on the flagstone.

Then the warm, pleasant embrace of sleep, or something very close to it.

He was back in his Raccoon City apartment, and it was dusk outside—deep bloody purples and reds, and molten golds—and Annette was there, caged in the window, smoking. “You’re not dead yet,” she told him, blowing smoke. “You’re just resting for now.”

“I got impaled in a storm,” he said, soberly. “That’s the kinda shit you think only happens to other people.”

“Did you ask Alfred about Alexia?” she asked.

“Says he doesn’t know shit. Neither does his asshole secretary,” he said, sitting on his couch, perfectly dry and intact. The smells of summer wafted through the room, mingling with the acrid smoke of Annette’s cigarette. It was a comforting smell, familiar. “Though found something about December 28th. Mean anything to you?”

“Alexia died then, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Nothing else?”

Annette shook her head, blew more smoke.

“Why am I even asking? This is a dream,” he said morosely, staring at his worn carpet. The coffee stain was still there, forever ingrained in the fibers. “It’s not like the movies, where ghosts visit you in your dreams,” he continued. “It’s just me wrestling with my subconscious. Asking myself questions, but through your mouth.”

“How astute,” she said, smiling.

“It helps,” he said, shrugging. “And I feel guilty, you know?”

“Self-flagellation,” she remarked, shaking her head.

“Alexia would say it was a waste of time.”

“She was right. It is.”

“I’m worried about Sherry,” Grayson said. “I don’t know if she’s alive.”

“She takes after me,” Annette said. Grayson realized her cigarette never seemed to shrink, and the glow looked weirdly artificial, like some children’s toy cigarette. “I’m sure she’s okay. I left her in good hands.”

Before Grayson could say anything else, the dream cut out abruptly, and he found himself in his room, no transition, with Alfred sleeping in a chair beside his bed. The wood had been removed, and someone had bandaged his wound.

 _Not Alfred, though_ , he told himself. _Probably the prison doctor. They’re good buddies._

Alfred woke up suddenly, as if from a nightmare, and looked at him. “You feeling all right, mate?” he asked, and the question took him by surprise, because Alfred rarely ever called him things like that. Standing up, Alfred walked to his bedside table. A battery-powered lantern came on, bathing the room in cold LED light. “You stupid wanker,” Alfred said, scowling. He looked even paler in the glow of the lantern, almost washed-out, shadows crawling in the geometry of his face. “Going out in a bloody storm like that! We have lights, Grayson, you stupid Yank. Christ. It could have waited.”

“Were you worried?” he asked, smiling.

“Of course I was, you git. God.” Alfred rolled his eyes. “Who else is going to clean up around here?” he asked. “I certainly am not. I’m a busy man.” He paused, heaved a sigh and looked at him. “How are you feeling?” His tone hung somewhere between concerned and politely angry. “Nasty wound you had. The good doctor was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to see to you.”

“I’ll be sure to send him a thank you note,” Grayson said, with absolutely no intention of doing so. That doctor gave him the creeps. He looked down at the bandages; his wound, strangely enough, didn’t hurt. Not even a little soreness. “I feel pretty good, considering.”

“Good,” Alfred said, starting toward the door. “I’ll let you rest up, then. I’ll check on you later.” He left.

He remembered the dragonfly then. His rumpled jeans had been discarded on the floor, and Grayson reached into the pocket, coming up with the barrette. “Good,” he said, “you’re still here.”


	7. Something to Keep Him Going

Grayson kept thinking about the night of the storm, how he should have died. Even with medical treatment, it shouldn’t have made a difference; Rockfort’s doctor wasn’t equipped to handle an injury of that caliber, because there was no need to handle injuries of that caliber. Patients didn’t exist on Rockfort; only victims did. Life here was, ultimately, cheap.

But that had happened three months ago. Still, it had been a sobering experience—literally. He’d been doing good with the booze, keeping away from it, though Grayson wasn’t sure why; it wasn’t as if he had much to live for anymore. He’d hit nothing but dead-end after dead-end in his investigation. Whatever Alfred knew, whatever Alexia had told him all those years ago, would likely go to the grave with him.

Grayson finished packing Alfred’s lunch—an egg and cress sandwich, a thermos of tea, another of ham and pea soup, and bottled water—and headed to The Palace. Heat seared the back of his neck; he was sweating buckets by the time he reached Alfred’s office. Mercifully, the air-conditioning was cranked up, full blast. The Swiss clock thumped shut behind him.

Alfred stared at his computer. "About time," he said, without looking up. "I'm absolutely starving." He sifted through several manila folders spread out on his desk, plucked a print-out from one of the folders, looked it over, his eyes scanning slowly, while he tapped something out, one-handed, on his computer. "Prisoner WKD4496," he announced, as if Grayson should have known who that was. "We caught her sneaking into our Paris lab."

"Seems like someone who's gotta death-wish," Grayson remarked, setting Alfred's lunch on the table. He opened the lunchbox, automatically dished out the food. Then he went to pour himself a glass of Alfred's scotch, but stopped, put the crystal decanter, and the glass, down. "You got anything to drink?"

“Alcohol suddenly not good enough for you?” Alfred asked, glancing up from his computer. His phone rang; he ignored it.

“It’s kinda like the meat thing, I guess,” Grayson said, shrugging. “Just can’t really stomach it anymore.”

“Maybe that piece of wood scarred your stomach, or something,” Alfred hazarded. The phone kept trilling. “Bloody hell,” he snapped, and snatched the handset off the cradle. “Alfred Ashford speaking.” He paused, took a blank sheet of paper from his printer, and an excessively pricey Montblanc from the pen rest on his desk. That was when you knew someone had fuck-you money, Grayson decided: when they had a pen that cost as much someone’s monthly wage. “Right,” Alfred muttered, scribbling something on the paper. “Yes, yes. Thank you.” He hung up.

“What was that about?”

“I have a representative from Metal Industries coming with a sample of a new alloy I’m interested in acquiring. And I might possibly invest in his company because of it, if all goes well. Always looking to diversify my portfolio.” Alfred carefully unwrapped his sandwich. “That was Paul Steiner on the phone, the Chief of Security, asking to clear Grisham, the rep,” he continued, biting into his sandwich, licking some mayonnaise and egg from his upper lip. “I told the stupid git to fax me, but, well, what can you do? Good sandwich, by the way, Grayson.”

“I know how you like it,” he said, and nodded. Then, “You meeting with Grisham today?”

“Indeed. We have a meeting at 3 o’clock,” Alfred said, unscrewing the cap of the thermos which contained pea and ham soup. He poured the soup into the cap, then pressed a button on his phone. “James? Bring some bottled water and, I don’t know, some fizzy drinks, since my guest doesn’t seem interested in alcohol.” He removed his finger from the button and sipped his pea and ham soup. “Good as ever,” he remarked.

“James?” Grayson said, raising an eyebrow. “What happened to Dorson?”

“He became problematic.”

“Poor guy.” Grayson looked over the spread of files and papers on Alfred’s desk, saw the file Alfred had been reviewing. He couldn’t be sure from this angle, but the woman in the photocopy—Grayson was pretty sure it was a woman anyway—looked familiar. “Mind if I see that paper, Alfred?” he asked, politely.

Alfred shrugged, tossed him the paper.

Claire Redfield. He knew the name; Nikolai had mentioned it, on their way out of Raccoon City. He also remembered her face, from NEST. “Did Nikolai send you this?” Grayson asked.

“Nikolai Zinoviev betrayed Umbrella, so no,” Alfred said, mildly. “Last I heard, the man went into hiding, or he was dead. Nobody can decide which.”

“There’s no way,” Grayson said. “He was a Monitor, UBCS.”

“It’s possible my intel’s wrong,” Alfred said. “They don’t keep me in the loop, and whatever news I do bloody get, it’s like playing Chinese whispers with headquarters.”

“He probably had some other assignment,” Grayson said. “Maybe from Spencer.”

Alfred poured more soup into the cap of his thermos and slurped noisily.

At a quarter to 3 o’clock, Alfred kicked him out of his office. A mousy-looking guy, who looked like someone who should be selling vacuum cleaners, shuffled into the office, clutching a calf-skin briefcase to his chest.

James, the new secretary, answered calls at his desk. He looked and sounded nothing like Dorson; his accent was East Coast, probably Boston. He had the beaten, hangdog look of a recovering alcoholic. "I'm sorry, Mr. Ashford's in a meeting." James glanced up, gave him the sort of awkward, close-lipped smile of a stranger who wanted to politely acknowledge you, but not talk. "He won't be available for another hour," James said, to the person on the phone. "Yes, I can take a message." He scribbled something on a notepad, with a blue disposable pen. "Yes, I'll tell him. Thank you. Have a good day." Before James could put the phone down, it was already ringing again. "Good afternoon," he said, with telemarketer politeness. "Director Alfred Ashford's office. How can I help you?"

He stepped out into the lobby, the smell of expensive tobacco and cleaning products congealing in the air. He wanted to talk to Redfield; Annette had entrusted Sherry to her, and yet Redfield was here, on Rockfort. “I told Annette couldn’t trust a fucking college kid,” Grayson muttered, thrusting his hands into his pockets and making his way down the red-carpeted stairs, across the lobby, his oxfords tapping sharply against the checkered marble.

The front-desk clerk watched him. She looked like James, if James had been female. “You should hook up with Alfred’s secretary,” Grayson advised, and left.

The sun beat down on him like a white-hot fist, pinpricks of sweat between his shoulders, on his nape. He regretted that today, of all days, he’d chosen to wear a suit; Alfred had been hounding him to look more presentable.

Down in the prison complex, a couple of guards in sleeveless shirts and dark gray fatigues gave him looks. Probably recognized him from the time they’d caught him behind the security office with that female guard he liked to fuck; but the guys, thankfully, had never mentioned it to Alfred. The less the boss knew, the less they had to deal with him, and so the guards told Alfred as little as possible.

The prison complex was a sprawl of tumble-down huts cobbled together from brick, soldered sheets of metal, grimy lengths of tarp, and they were hemmed in by twenty-foot concrete walls bristling with razor wire. The buildings where the guards worked and lived were concrete, built to withstand tropical storms. Grayson headed to the processing office, at the back of the security building.

He took the crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out as best as he could. Claire’s face stared blankly at him from the photocopied picture.

Luckily for him, the guard he'd fucked behind the security building, and still fucked on occasion in other places, worked in the processing office; she'd get him access to Claire, off the books.

He thumbed the button on the intercom mounted by a gray-painted fire-door. “Hey, it’s Grayson Harman,” he said, to the intercom. “I need in.”

A woman’s voice—he was pretty sure her name was Dana, though didn’t remember if he’d ever actually asked—said, “Grayson? We weren’t expecting you.”

“Came to see you,” he lied.

“Hold on.”

The little light on the intercom went from red to green. The door released, and he opened it.

He passed a metal detector, went down a hallway, turned a corner. A door stood there. Adhesive letters on the frosted glass spelled out PROCESSING.

The processing office was a tiny room staffed by the woman-who-might-have-been-named-Dana, and some guy of ambiguous race whose name Grayson could never remember. The office was plain, painted in neutrals and carpeted in cheap acrylic fiber. Two aluminum desks stood in the middle of the room, facing each other, a computer on each. Maybe-Dana sat at one, and Ambiguous Guy sat at the other; though Ambiguous Guy wasn't in today. A door stood on his left; it led to the holding cells, where the guards kept people until they could make room for them in the prison.

“Hey,” he said to Maybe-Dana, smiling.

Maybe-Dana was a pretty woman with straight blonde hair, which she tied back, and blue eyes. He vaguely remembered her mentioning something about a childhood in Minnesota. “Grayson,” she said, smiling. “I’m not done yet, but give me a few minutes, I can go on my lunch.”

He sat on the edge of her desk. A photo of her two kids and husband stared at him from the desk, framed in black plastic. “Actually,” he said, looking at her now, “I’m not here for sex. Something else.”

“It’s just a casual thing, Grayson.”

“No, no. I get that.” He tossed the print-out of Claire onto her desk. “I need to talk to her,” he said, deadly serious. “Now.”

Maybe-Dana looked at the picture. “Rodrigo brought her in last night,” she said.

“I need to talk to her. It’s important.”

“If my superiors find out—”

“They don’t gotta know. I’ll be in and out.”

Maybe-Dana sighed, stood up, took the keys off her hip and unlocked the door. “I don’t know what you want with her, but you touch her, it’s my ass.”

“I’m not gonna do anything to her, promise,” Grayson said. Though, he thought, that entirely depended on what Redfield had done with Sherry. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “All I need is fifteen minutes.”

“Just make it quick. Someone sees you in there and word gets up to Alfred, I’m fucking done. You’re fucking lucky you’re a good fuck, Grayson.”

“Fifteen minutes,” he repeated, and went inside. The door shut behind him.

Claire was the only one there. She wore a black T-shirt, dirty jeans, a red vest which looked like something a biker would wear. Her reddish-brown hair was tied back, wet with sweat. She was sitting against the water-stained concrete, knees up.

“You Claire Redfield?” 

“You here to move me to the isolation cell?” she asked, and looked up. “That guard, the one who brought me in? Pretty pissed when I bit his arm.” Claire stood up and crossed the cell, wrapping her fists around the bars, meeting his eyes. Hers were the precise blue of Caribbean water. Dirt streaked her cheeks; a bruise yellowed beneath her right eye. “You’re in a suit, so it’s pretty obvious you’re no guard. You with Umbrella?”

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”

“You’re here for something,” she said.

“Sherry Birkin.”

Claire stared at him, as if she couldn’t decide whether or not she should kill him.

“My name’s Grayson Harman. I… was involved with her mom, Annette. Sherry’s like a daughter to me.”

“How do I know you’re not some Umbrella asshole wanting to know where she is?”

Grayson took out his wallet, from the inside of his blazer, and opened it. He showed her the picture of Annette and Sherry, the one they’d taken together at the Raccoon City Zoo. “See? It’s me in the picture. With Annette and Sherry.”

Claire studied the picture. Then, “Sherry told me about this.” She looked at him, probably expecting him to fill in the gaps, to prove he wasn’t some Umbrella asshole trying to pass himself off as legitimate.

“It was June. Sherry was nine, and wanted to see the tigers,” Grayson said. “She was really excited about the tigers. I bought her a stuffed one from the gift-shop, and we ate ice cream cones on the bench by the tiger pen, because she wanted to see them one more time before the zoo closed. So we sat there until it closed, the three of us. She fell asleep, and Annette and I carried her back to the car.”

“Jesus, you really are Grayson,” Claire said. “I thought you were just some Umbrella fuckwad using his name. They want Sherry; something to do with the G-Virus. Why the fuck are you here?”

“I work for the guy in charge of Rockfort,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

Maybe-Dana popped her head into the room. “You got five minutes,” she told him, and then shut the door again.

“Is Sherry okay?” he pleaded.

She nodded. Sweat pebbled on her face, made it shine. “She’s okay,” Claire said, licking her dry lips. “Leon has her. He’s a good friend of mine.”

“Leon Kennedy?”

“You know him?”

“We served together in the RPD.”

“He never mentioned that.”

 _No surprise_ , Grayson thought. _We parted on shitty_ _terms_. “You know anything about Jill Valentine?” he asked.

“She was my brother’s partner in S.T.A.R.S,” Claire said. “They’re good friends.”

“She never asked about me?”

Claire shook her head. “No, afraid not. Why, you know her?”

“From work. In passing,” he lied. That was a lifetime ago, another Grayson.

“Grayson,” Maybe-Dana said, opening the door. “Time’s up.”

“I’ll see what I can do about your situation,” Grayson whispered, and moved away from the cell. “I’m done,” he told Maybe-Dana. “Lead on.”


	8. Conspiracies

A few days later, while Alfred and him played chess—Grayson had been losing spectacularly—the first of several bombs dropped.

In his office, Alfred, with his favorite antique bolt-action across his lap, answered a round of calls: panicked soldiers and civvies wanting to know when the evac was coming; pencil-pushers from headquarters demanding to know what the fuck was going on at Rockfort, and what measures Alfred was taking to contain the situation; concerned—not for Alfred, but for the assets and money they were losing—suits in Umbrella’s Finance Department.

Then the line went dead. The lights flickered and blew out.

Grayson, through the window behind Alfred’s desk, watched Rockfort burn. Several planes—none of the profiles matched any of the planes hangared on Rockfort, Alfred informed him—flew low over the island, like a flock of predatory birds swooping down for the kill, the roar of their engines bassing down into subsonics which shook the building, the ground.

“Must be a bloody rival company.”

“Maybe Spencer’s decided he’s done with you,” Grayson said.

“If Spencer wanted me dead, this is hardly his style. Look at what he did to Marcus.” Alfred stood up and slung his rifle over his shoulder. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: Oswell Spencer killed James Marcus, same as he killed my grandfather, Edward. Come along, we’re going to personally investigate the matter, Grayson.”

“ _We_?”

Alfred came around his desk, got in his face; his breath smelled like expensive scotch and mint humbugs. “You’re my butler,” he said, and then the fight left him, and he looked scared. “You’re my _friend,”_ he continued, almost pleadingly. Grayson had only seen that look on Alfred’s face once before—when Alexia had died.

“Okay,” Grayson said, after a long, uncomfortable moment. “Okay, I’m with you.”

Alfred patted his shoulders. “Good man,” he said, and then he turned around, kicked the glass of a showcase into pieces. “Whoever did this, I’m going to make them wish they never did,” he said, a cold, evil edge in his voice.

He didn’t doubt that; Alfred had turned sadism into a fine art.

Grayson followed him through James’s office; it looked like one of those display rooms in a museum that showcased the way someone had lived, their memory and all its physical trappings lovingly and meticulously preserved by a team of exhibit designers. “You think Spencer really killed Marcus? Edward?” he asked.

“I’ve no proof, but I know he’s a bloody rat,” Alfred said. “Spencer’s wanted full control of the company for years, and just about has it. When… when my dear sister died, the Ashfords lost their chance to take Umbrella back. Alexia would have wrested control from Oswell, Grayson. I—that’s never been something I was ever capable of.” He went quiet, standing there, in the darkness, like a mourner who just wanted to be alone with the body.

“Stop putting yourself down,” Grayson said, with an earnestness that surprised him. “Without you, Umbrella’s paramilitary wouldn’t be shit. You designed their training program yourself. You went to Sandhurst. You’ve succeeded in other ways, Alfred. So stop comparing yourself to Alexia, man.”

“Thank you,” Alfred said.

“Sure. I can jerk you off some more later, but right now, we need to get this power back on. That was what you were gonna do, right?”

“Astute, Grayson.”Alfred opened a drawer on James’s desk, and fished out a heavy-duty flashlight.

“Convenient,” Grayson remarked.

“James always kept a bloody torch close,” Alfred explained, turning it on, flashing it around the room, illuminating bookcases, and a pair of overstuffed Chesterfield sofas crowded around a coffee-table of carved Vietnamese rosewood. A vase of wilting canna lilies sat on the table. “All the random blackouts, you know?” He shouldered through the door, Grayson trailing his heels like a Doberman.

The lobby was empty. Several reels of paper, pens, and folders lay scattered across the checkered tile. The employees had left in a hurry. “So what makes you think Spencer killed your grandpa?” Grayson asked, following Alfred down the staircase.

“Edward was a brilliant man,” Alfred said, shining the flashlight around, making shadows crawl and move. With the power out, the air-conditioning no longer worked, and the humid South Pacific heat was beginning to settle, thick and close, inside the lobby. “An experienced researcher, yet somehow made a beginner’s mistake which cost him his life? No, Grayson. It was bloody sabotage, and Oswell was behind it. Just like he’s behind this mess.”

“But you said this isn’t Spencer’s style,” Grayson pointed out, trailing Alfred across the lobby, papers, folders, and pens crunching under his shoes.

“Perhaps he switched his M.O? He knows I wouldn’t expect him to go the direct route.” Traces of paranoid insanity colored his voice, and Alfred continued, slowly unraveling, “It’s all part of his bloody plan. He can’t kill me like that bastard, William Birkin. No. I’m still the grandson of a founder, Grayson. Spencer needs to kill me in a way I nor anyone else would expect.”

“Relax,” Grayson told him, frowning. He didn’t need Alfred to lose his shit. _N_ _ot here, not now_. “It’s all conjecture right now. Just take a breather, man.”

Muttering to himself, Alfred thumped open the front doors, and they stepped outside, into wet humidity. The cobbles were slick, puddles pooling in the cracks between them, and the rain was coming steadily down. Palm trees rustled in the warm, wet breeze.

“Hopefully,” Alfred said, making his way past manicured hedges, flower beds, and topiaries which hedged the path from The Palace, “the prisoners aren’t taking advantage of the situation.”

“It’s no doubt they are,” Grayson said, staring at the back of Alfred’s head, at the gold waves in it, like the lines in a sand-garden. “Humans don’t like being cooped up, Alfred, and those guys, they got bones to pick with you. But your guys are well-trained. I’m sure they gotta handle on the situation.” _We can only hope._

Occasionally, Grayson heard distant bursts of automatic fire, shouts. The air, as they descended from the hill to the prison compound, smelled of gasoline and burned rubber, and something chemical underneath that. He imagined it as the smell of human fear: glutamate so thick and tangible, it wafted in clouds through the air, like a miasma.

And, underneath that, he smelled something else: rot. It was a familiar smell, and…

… he was in Raccoon City, surrounded by infected, their eyes glaucous and hungry, skin sloughing away, revealing jellied wounds. He was just about out of ammo, and they were closing in, stretching out their arms, closing fast. He beat some of them away, but was overpowered, the stench of putrid flesh filling his nostrils, making him taste it in the back of his throat, and…

… Alfred was shaking him and saying, “Grayson? Grayson, we don’t have bloody time to tarry.”

He became aware, then, that he’d stopped dead in his tracks; and wondered, idly, how long he’d been standing there. Shaking his head, Grayson said, “Sorry,” and trudged after Alfred. His head ached.

“You were standing there for a good few minutes,” Alfred remarked. “Daydreaming, I suspect. But now isn’t the time for your daydreaming, Grayson. You bloody creatives—you spend too much time in your own heads.”

“Sorry,” he repeated, rubbing his forehead, “it won’t happen again.”


	9. The Long Game

"So you're really gonna be the Head of the Family, huh?"

Alexia looked up from her desk. She'd been writing equations, which looked more like cryptography puzzles than math expressions, for the last four hours, mostly in silence. She was listening to Kraftwerk's _The Man Machine_ album on her record-player, her thinking music.

"That's what father said," she replied, scribbling more symbols and letters in her notebook.

"Where's he at anyway?" he asked, and sat on the edge of her desk, fiddling with her Newton's cradle.

Alexia said nothing. She turned a page in her notebook, scribbled more math-stuff. She wore a black sweater-vest over a lacy white dress. Her family proof, the ruby, glittered on her tie-pin.

"Alexia? You heard me?"

"I heard you. I don't know where father's gone." She paused. "Can you switch the record, Grayson?" 

He abandoned the Newton's cradle and hopped off her desk, and walked over to her vinyl collection; it was a cabinet almost as tall as him—he was pretty tall for fifteen, at a little over six feet—jammed with records. Alexia owned all sorts of records: experimental shit he'd never heard of, classical, synthpop, rock, jazz, and everything else. He selected _Number of the Beast_. 

Alexia put down her pen. "This isn't thinking music," she remarked.

"Then maybe stop thinking." Grayson stood behind her, leaning against the backrest of her chair, folding his arms atop her head. "So you're gonna be the new Ashford bigwig, huh?"

"So it seems," she said, trailing off.

"You okay?"

"Yes," she said.

"I don't buy it."

"I'm fine, Grayson. Just a lot on my bloody plate right now." Alexia sighed, tipped her head back and looked at him with big blue eyes, frowning. She reached up, pinched his cheeks, and then smiled with white teeth. "So many things that need to be done," she told him. "Umbrella is going to be my responsibility."

"Sure, if Spencer kicks the bucket."

"I have a plan," Alexia said, and something in her eyes flashed.

"Fill me in?"

She shook her head, stood up. "Not yet."

"You always play things close to your chest," he said.

"Chess is a game of foresight and careful planning, dear Grayson." Alexia poked his nose, adding, "My maneuvers are always calculated. I play The Long Game."

"Grayson?" Alfred's voice hacked into him like a machete. "Grayson, you're doing it again."

Grayson blinked, looking around him as if seeing Rockfort for the first time. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the smell of burning fuel, and the glutamate-tang underneath it, was thick in the air. Smoke hung over the compound like an opaque curtain. "I was just thinking," he said. "About Alexia."

Alfred's mouth became a thin, hard line. "Now isn't the time—"

"No," Grayson interrupted, "that's not what it was." _Ada said she'd gone into cryo, that Umbrella had funded it, because Alexia was Spencer's last hope. "_ She said she was playing a Long Game with Spencer," he said, finally. "Something in her eyes that night..."

"She's dead, Grayson," Alfred said, the words like stones dropping into a hole.

"Yeah," he said, after a moment. "I know."

"I need you to focus right now, mate," Alfred said, flashing the light on him. "We need to get the bloody power back on. Otherwise, we're not getting out of here."

"You're _abandoning_ Rockfort?"

"Not abandoning," Alfred said, and shook his head. "A tactical retreat. Then I'll return with the full bloody force of Umbrella's paramilitary and recapture the island." He started walking, his gun rattling in its leather sling. "Right now, I'm at a bloody disadvantage, Grayson."

"You got guys here."

"Not enough to retake the bloody island," Alfred said. "And they're probably all dead."

"You think Spencer—assuming this _is_ his hit—is gonna just let you walk away?"

"Spencer is an old man!" Alfred snapped, whipping around on him, his face red with anger. "I'm the bloody Chief of Paramilitary," he yelled, growing steadily redder, as if every blood vessel in his skull was about to pop. "The men follow _my_ orders. Not _his_. Do you understand me, Grayson? I'm the fucking boss when it comes to this company's paramilitary. Not that paraplegic dinosaur. _Do you understand_?"

"Jesus. Calm the fuck down."

Alfred counted backwards from ten, under his breath, and the blood slowly drained from his face until he looked, once again, like a pale reptile. "Right," he said, and turned around, walking stiffly away. "Power plant."

The power plant was a small hydroelectric station near the security building, hemmed in by a chain-link fence which, had the power been on, would have been electrified. Dead soldiers lay around the muddy yard. 

Alfred stepped over the bodies, clutching his bolt-action rifle. Large canisters, each one stamped with the bio-hazard symbol and the Umbrella logo, were stacked on a pallet by the concrete wall; they'd burst, leaking some sort of blueish chemical which had the consistency of vegetable oil.

Grayson realized that had been the smell, the one he'd imagined as glutamate. "Don't get near those," he told Alfred.

Alfred looked at the canisters, paling. "Oh no," he said.

He heard something move near the pallet. Alfred swung his gun toward the noise, one hand on the trigger and stock, the other cocking back the bolt handle.

Maybe-Dana dragged herself into the open, with one arm; the other had been blown off at the elbow, a messy spaghetti-work of bone, tendon, and muscle. Eyes like foggy pearls in a rotting skull. Her lower-body had been blown away. A knot of muddy entrails, sticky with drying fluids, flared out from under her rib-cage, and when she moaned, it bubbled out from her, jellied rubies pooling in the corners of her mouth.

The others bodies moved, then, and started to crawl or walk, or move in whatever way their remaining limbs allowed them to. Grayson froze, and…

It was just Marvin, Clancy, and him. Clancy was dying. The undead were battering the fence, their dead faces stonewashed in the floodlights. They were hungry, and they knew the meat was there, just on the other side.

Stretching their arms through the gaps in the wrought-iron fence, they doubled their efforts to get through, threatening to topple it.

They couldn't shoot; they had to conserve ammunition. So they retreated inside; but some of the survivors were already showing symptoms, and…

Grayson pushed Alfred away, before Maybe-Dana could take a chunk out of his leg, and stomped her skull in; it cracked, gave way under his shoe like a soft melon. "Get the fucking power on," Grayson told him. "I'll draw the fuckers away from you. We'll meet up at The Palace."

"You're fucking suicidal," Alfred said, and turned, blew a zombie's head off, then cocked back the bolt-handle to eject the empty casing. "You're barmy, Grayson. There's nearly a bloody dozen of them!"

"I survived Raccoon City," he said, and he started banging on shit, whooping and making noise—anything to get them away from Alfred. He saw a guard's gun, a standard 9mm, on the ground. Grayson grabbed it, then said, "Get the fucking power back on!"

The zombies careened toward him, forgetting Alfred. "Grayson!" Alfred shouted, over the wailing and the loud shuffling of feet. "Don't you dare bloody die!"

"I survived Raccoon City," Grayson repeated, and started running. The gun, he discovered, after a quick check of its magazine, was empty. "Get that power on!" he shouted. "The Palace!" Then, to the zombies, "C'mon, assholes! I'm a big motherfucker. Bet you'd _love_ to eat this!"

He ran. And kept running. Through chain-link gates, through narrow, damp alleyways between the prisoners' barracks.

It didn't take him long to shake the zombies; they were slow-moving, unintelligent. He reached a small courtyard surrounded by squat, dilapidated buildings cobbled together from rusty sheets of soldered metal, rain-bloated plywood, brickwork stained black with soot, and grimy lengths of blue tarp.

Something moved, and Grayson instinctively reached for his gun, and then remembered it was empty.

"Grayson?" Claire stared at him, from behind a gun. She lowered it. She was soaked from the rain, and her jeans were torn in some places. "Holy shit."

"The gun's empty," he said. "You got some spare ammo?"


	10. Conflicts of Self and Other Problems

He hated being alone.

Grayson and Alexia had gone off again. Ever since they’d started dating, his dear sister—his _twin_ —spent more time with _h_ _im_ than her own brother: her flesh and blood, her _soldier_.

Though Alexia claimed most of that time was spent working in her laboratory, Alfred remained unconvinced; he’d seen movies, read books, and Alexia simply wanted to spare him the truth of the matter. Teenagers were nothing but bundles of bad decisions and raging hormones, and they were in that laboratory, Alfred knew, doing _things_. _Disgusting_ things. _Touching_. _Kissing_.

“He’s not even noble-born,” he said to his tin soldier diorama of the Battle of Langensalza. Alexia had, what felt like a lifetime ago, helped him build it, and Grayson had, under his careful instruction, painted the soldiers. “He’s not even bloody English,” he said. “He’s a Yank! Of all things, my sister’s in love with a damned Colonial. A damned Colonial with no pedigree to speak of. The Ashfords have fallen low, haven’t we?”

The Hanoverians and Prussians said nothing, frozen in their miniature battle. Alfred frowned, and then he started to sulk again.

Alfred moved away from the diorama and searched through his books, eventually settling on _The_ _Art of War._ Then he sat at his writing desk, determined to read, to take his mind off Alexia and Grayson, and the things they were doing in her laboratory. But couldn’t. He wondered if Alexia missed him as much as he missed her, and if she did, whether or not Grayson even cared?

“That’s how it always goes,” Alfred said, to nobody. “She’ll marry him one day—mark my words—even if I disagree with it, and then they’ll have children, and Alexia won’t have time for me anymore. Where will I be, then?” A tear stung his eye, and Alfred quickly wiped it away and muttered, “Probably here.”

Alfred jolted from his thoughts.

The gate to the power-station had been opened; someone had cut through the padlock with, if the marks were any indication, some sort of handsaw.

He squeaked through, made his way down a narrow, muddy alley which ran alongside the building in an L-shape, fingering the trigger of his MR7 bolt-action. The laser sight trembled, flickered.

A white-painted fire-door stood in front of him, and, like the padlock, someone had forced their way inside. Judging by the sloppiness of their handiwork, they’d been in a rush, which hardly surprised him; zombies roamed the compound like packs of starving coyotes, eating every scrap of meat, dead or otherwise, they could find, and there were probably other things, too, which he’d yet encountered.

“I should have never let Spencer build a bloody lab here,” he muttered.

“No,” Alexia said to him, her voice somewhere to his right, “you shouldn’t have, Alfred. You know Oswell can’t be trusted. He wants to exterminate the Ashford line. We’re his final obstacle.”

“I know, Alexia,” Alfred said, and looked at her, his blue eyes meeting his twin’s. Idly, he wondered when she’d gotten there. “I see you finally decided to catch up,” he added, testily. “Grayson and I could have used your help back there.”

Alexia waved his Walther and said, “I had to find this.”

“I could have sworn I’d taken it with me,” he said, and checked his hip, finding the holster empty. “You took it.”

She just smiled. “You didn’t give it to Grayson,” she remarked.

“I needed a sidearm,” he argued.

“He could have died, Alfred, because of your selfishness,” Alexia hissed, visibly souring, her eyes hardening to nuggets of ice. “I would have never forgiven you, if that had happened. Do you understand, brother? I would hate you forever.”

“Alexia, please, I’m sorry…”

“If it happens again, there will be problems,” she said, and pushed the gun against his temple, smiling icily, showing a sliver of straight white teeth. The muzzle was cold against his skin, bit into it. “I will shoot you, Alfred,” Alexia said, very dispassionately. “Do you understand?”

“It won’t happen again, Alexia,” he assured her, feeling hot sweat under the cool film of raindrops on his skin. “I swear.”

She took the gun away. “Good,” she said.

Alfred stepped inside the power-station, the smell of blood assailing his nostrils, and he could taste it, metallic and old, in the back of his throat. It was a massacre, inside that room: blood spattered the walls and floor, as if some mad Pollock had tossed bucketfuls of viscera everywhere. Several corpses lay on the concrete, each one dressed in matte black tactical gear, their faces obscured by tinted visors and helmets, or they were slumped against the walls, draped over machines, torn apart, their guts trawled across the floor.

He rolled one of the corpses onto its belly with his foot, the laser sight searing a red brand on the man’s skull. H.C.F was stamped in white on the back of the man’s thick Kevlar vest, which was sticky with blood, peppered with bullet-holes.

“Automatics, like the bodies outside,” he told Alexia.

“I’ve never heard of the H.C.F,” she said.

“Neither have I,” Alfred said, stepping over the bodies, feeling a constant edge of paranoia that one would bite his leg. By the time he reached the computer controls, his trousers were red to just under the knees with blood. “But Spencer has several secrets, dear sister.”

“He does,” Alexia agreed, and looked at the monitor. The screen displayed several graphics which listed water-levels, the status of the turbines and pumps, power percentages. A prompt informing them to pull the manual control switch blinked impatiently. “It seems they nearly had it online.”

“The manual switch is in the control room, I believe,” Alfred said, flashing his light and moving past the inert turbines and pumps, slipping and skidding on gore. “Hopefully, they have a bloody manual in here somewhere on how to operate the computer systems.”

“Or,” Alexia said, smiling, “perhaps we’ll get lucky and find that one of the technicians survived?”

*

“So that’s what happened,” Claire said, walking alongside him. They were somewhere in the prisoners’ encampment, though Grayson wasn’t sure which block. “Guy let me outta the isolation cell and told me the island’s been attacked.”

“His name’s Rodrigo Raval,” Grayson told her, slotting the spare magazine Claire had given him, after he’d convinced her that he had no interest in blowing her head open. “He’s the captain of the 3rd Security Unit and Prisoner Transport. Was working at Umbrella’s Paris headquarters for a while, but he was born here, on Rockfort. Trained here, too.”

“He seems okay,” Claire said. “He let me out, I mean.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Not so good,” she said, frowning. “He was hurt pretty bad.”

Grayson nodded.

“So,” she said, “you work for the Warden, huh?”

“Yep.”

“But you were a cop.”

“Yep.”

Claire stared at him, puzzled.

“It’s a long story,” Grayson told her.

The buildings in this block of the encampment were in even worse shape than the ones from before. Tumble-down, they were a good storm away from collapsing entirely. Holes in the brickwork revealed damp, inhospitable interiors of rain-swollen wood, some boarded up with sloppily nailed two-by-fours, or sheets of plywood. He knew Alfred’s exorbitant expenditures had severely cut into the prison’s budget, and that was probably why this block was in such a rough state: there wasn’t enough money to go around, and Alfred didn’t care anyway.

“Sherry talked a lot about you,” Claire said, after a long silence. A ruined gutter poured water, and a large, stagnant puddle had formed underneath it.

“We’re close,” Grayson said.

“You dated her mom,” Claire pointed out.

“And I was gonna marry her,” he said, his chest tightening. Now Annette was dead, and that was never going to happen. He thought about his dream, then; that was how he wanted to remember Annette: sitting on his window, smoking a cigarette and smiling in their last summer together.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said, as if she sensed his thoughts. “Annette loved you,” she added, cautiously. “She told me to tell you that, if I ever saw you.”

He nodded. “Thanks.” A pause, and then he said, “She was the one who saved Sherry.”

“If Annette hadn’t given her the vaccine, she’d be dead.”

“I know,” he said, with a small, weak smile. “She wasn’t bad,” he continued, feeling as if he needed to defend Annette, right her memory. “She just… didn’t know how to juggle her private life and job. But she loved Sherry. Loved me. She was a good woman who didn’t—she _shouldn’t_ have died, and it was my fault that she did.”

“Annette said you’d feel like that,” Claire said. “Said you’d keep carrying that guilt forever, and she wanted you to know that you didn’t have to, because you didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything you could. It was a bad situation, Grayson, and it was out of your hands—out of everyone’s hands.”

“I knew Umbrella was up to something,” Grayson told her, frowning, all of his guilt rising in him like sickness. “I should’ve listened to my gut,” he continued, angrily. “Should’ve gotten outta town before shit hit the fan, with Sherry and Annette. I didn’t, and now look where it got me. Where it got them.”

“Nobody could’ve expected a fucking zombie outbreak,” Claire said, firmly.

He said nothing.


	11. Connection Pending

Alfred stared at the Walther, puzzled. “Strange,” he remarked, and holstered it on his hip. “I don’t remember pulling it. I already had a bloody gun...”

He’d secured the torch to his belt. Inert terminals, and the large, rounded shapes of the turbines, pipes, and pumps materialized from the darkness. The control room was on the other side of the station, up a set of expansion-grate steps, and he could see it now, just beyond a toppled stack of pallets.

Something moved behind the pallets. Alfred cocked the bolt-lever and aimed.

“Wait,” a man said, and stood up, hands in the air, red laser-light beading in his right eye. He wore dirty white coveralls, and a hard hat. “They turned,” the technician told him. “One was bitten, and then he bit the others and… shit, I ran and hid as soon as they started attacking each other.”

“Identify yourself,” Alfred demanded, keeping his gun on the man.

“James Kelly,” the man said. “I’m one of the technicians here. Please, don’t shoot me. I’m not armed.”

“I need the power online,” Alfred said.

“I can get it online,” the technician said. “As long as it’s safe. Are there any more zombies?”

Alfred was becoming very impatient with the man; his finger twitched on the trigger. “You dare make demands of me?” he said coolly. “I am not your personal gunman, Mr. Kelly. I’m your boss.”

“You’re… you’re Alfred Ashford?”

“I am.”

The man motioned for him to follow, and Alfred did. He stepped over the pallets and followed the technician upstairs, through a door with a busted lock.

Several computers and terminals, each one bristling with gauges and switches, were crammed inside the room. The floor was tiled, scuffed from years of work-boots, and a large window overlooked the ground floor of the station. A chalkboard announced shift-schedules, and countless sticky-notes were stuck to the metal trim of the board, scribbled over in messy handwriting: reminders, complaints, instructions, the crude sketch of a woman with naked breasts. On one of the notes, it read:

 _Ashford’s fucking crazy, so don’t fuck up the job, newbie. And whatever you do,_ _if you see him,_ _don’t ask about his fucking sister, even if you hear the guys talking about her._ _It’s just locker-room talk._

_\- Gary_

Alfred glowered, his jaw tensing.

“So disrespectful, aren’t they?” Alexia was leaning on a stack of racked CRT monitors, staring at the note. “Men. They can’t go a day without discussing a woman’s unmentionables, can they?”

“It’s because you’re so beautiful, Alexia,” Alfred said.

“Though,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him, “I never minded when Grayson did those things. Granted, it was all very harmless; we were only children, after all. But I liked being complimented by him.”

“Must we really talk about Harman right now?” Alfred snapped.

“Sir?”

Alfred, and his dear sister, looked at the technician.

“Sorry,” Kelly said, swallowing something in his throat. “I-I thought you were speaking to me. I… I almost have manual control overridden. It locked me out of the system, but I know the administrative codes.”

“Look at him,” Alexia mused, smiling. “Shaking like a leaf.”

A few moments passed. The turbines whirred to life, making the building vibrate, and the lights flickered on.

Now, in the sickly glow of the incandescent lights, Alfred saw Kelly’s face, and he looked scared. Alexia stood over him like the shadow of some predatory egret. Part of Kelly’s head dissolved suddenly into a cloud of red mist, and his body slumped in the chair, his coveralls, from the neck down, soaked with blood.

Alfred lowered his gun, and Alexia said, “We didn’t need him anymore.”

*

Grayson side-stepped the dead soldier and pushed it to the ground, firing a single shot into its head. Blood pooled underneath its rotting skull, and post-mortem spasms wracked its body, gradually smoothing to soft twitches, and then rigor mortis. He called the sequence the Three Stages of Knowing a Zombie Was Dead, and this one was _dead_.

Claire finished off her own problem, a female guard, with a shot to the skull. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said, as the woman toppled, bleeding out in the mud, slowly moving through the Three Stages. “I thought Raccoon City was the last time I’d have to see these fuckers,” she told him. “Still give me the creeps. Shit. How ‘bout you?”

“They’re walking corpses,” Grayson said flatly, tucking the gun into the waistband of his pants, the molded plastic grip slanted across his stomach. “Anyway,” he continued, “there’s worse things out there. You saw William Birkin.”

“Don’t remind me,” Claire said, and shook her head.

“Chronenberg shit,” Grayson agreed.

This part of the compound had housed the paramilitary. Unlike the prisoner blocks, the area was fairly well-kept. Communal buildings, where the soldiers had slept, lived, and entertained themselves, formed neat rows, and where the roads weren’t wide enough for vehicles, they were paved.

They passed an empty rec-center, and through the open door, Grayson glimpsed an aged box-set television, pool-table, worn couches and chairs, bookshelves. The television was on; _Lethal Weapon_ was playing.

“Power’s back on,” Grayson told Claire.

“They got cable out here?”

Grayson shook his head. “No. Umbrella sends tapes,” he explained, remembering something Maybe-Dana had mentioned. “They gotta Nintendo, too, and from what I heard, guys were always fighting over it. With their fists. It’s boring out here, Claire.”

“They have a computer? Internet?” she asked, looking at him. Something that might have been hope in her eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “Umbrella’s got their SatNet. Slow as shit, but it gets the job done.”

“Think they got one in the rec-center?”

“We could look,” he said. _You don’t have time right now, Grayson. Gotta get back to Alfred…_

They went inside, and it smelled of rot, and of stale beer and piss. A few zombies lay on the floorboards; someone had shot them. The wounds looked fairly recent.

Someone came up behind him and put a gun to his head, and a voice—not a guard, but someone who sounded very young—said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Grayson Harman, and the woman there is Claire Redfield,” Grayson explained. Claire had her gun out, pointed at his attacker. He could smell the guy’s stale sweat.

“You’re not with Umbrella?”

“We’re not,” Claire said, before Grayson could say anything.

He no longer felt the gun pressing against the back of his skull. A thin kid, who looked no older than seventeen, maybe eighteen, stood there. His reddish-brown hair was greasy, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He wore the tatters of a prison uniform, the fabric stained dark with blood and grime. He looked, Grayson decided, like DiCaprio after a bender, and a few rounds of boxing with a giant kangaroo.

“My name’s Steve Burnside,” the kid said.

“What’s a kid like you doing on Rockfort?” Grayson asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Do you know if they’ve gotta computer in here, Steve?” Claire asked suddenly, lowering her gun.

“Sure,” Steve said. "How the guards kept in touch with their families. E-mail. Calls were only for the higher-ups, the guys who really licked Alfred’s boots.”

“Alfred?” Claire said.

“The Warden,” Steve said. “He’s fuckin’ crazy.”

Claire looked at him, and Grayson shrugged.

“Where’s this computer?” he asked.

Steve motioned for them to follow. Grayson realized Steve was barefoot; his feet were cut up pretty bad. “It’s in here, the ‘web-room’,” he explained, opening a door. The room was small, with three partitioned computer stations, and a fan. “I dunno why you guys care,” he added. “You gonna what? E-mail the police?”

“Something like that,” Claire said, and sat down at one of the computers. She frowned at the login screen. “Grayson, can you get me access?”

“Sure,” he said, and leaned over her, tapping in his credentials. “Alfred gave me administrative permissions, so you shouldn’t have any problems shooting off your mail.”

“Alfred gave you permissions?” Steve said, staring at him. “Alfred doesn’t give permissions to anyone, except that creepy fucking doctor, and his little cabal of bootlickers. So which are you, Grayson?” He looked at Claire, and said, “I bet he’s setting you up. Alfred’s gonna see your shit, and—”

“And what?” Grayson interjected, staring back at him. He felt sorry for the kid; he looked as if he hadn’t slept or eaten in days. “The place is overrun with zombies, kid. There’s nothing Alfred can do to anyone right now.”

Steve frowned, and said nothing.

“Okay,” Claire said, pulling up his Umbrella inbox. There was nothing interesting in it; mostly, it was Alfred reminding him to do things, a few racy e-mails from Maybe-Dana, and some from Umbrella inquiring about his time in Raccoon City. The Questions Committee, formally Umbrella Internal Affairs, was a relentless beast, and they’d been nipping at his ass for the past three months. Claire, however, paid no mind to those e-mails, and went straight to composing a new one, addressed to LSkennedy@aol.com

“You’re e-mailing Leon?”

“He can get into contact with Chris,” Claire told him.

“He’s with Sherry, right?”

Claire nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks,” Grayson said, meaning it. “I want her to know I’m alive.”

“What’s this gonna do for anyone?” Steve asked, looking between them. “E-mailing buddies of yours? We need fucking Interpol, not your goddamn friends.”

“Trust me,” Claire said. “My brother’s the right guy for this.”

Steve cursed, shook his head, and studied a faded _Sports Illustrated_ poster taped to the wall.

“She’s not wrong,” Grayson said, remembering Chris, the way he always looked so determined. He was one of the few guys Grayson could say walked the walk. “Besides,” he continued, “Interpol’s not gonna come. Umbrella’s gotta lot of money, kid, and they know how to weaponize it. But Chris? He’ll come. And I know that, because his sister’s here.”

“Anyone you wanna contact?” Claire said, and looked at Steve.

Steve shook his head. “No,” he said, “there’s nobody anymore.”


	12. Like Those Guys Who Whip Themselves

Steve was in bad shape, so they decided to take a breather in the rec-center, recoup their energy. Grayson managed to find a crate of non-perishables in the kitchen, which Steve and Claire devoured, and water, which Steve and Claire drank.

“They only fed us twice a day,” Steve told him, around a mouthful of baked beans. “Once in the morning,” he continued, spooning more out of the can and shoveling it into his mouth, licking a blob of sauce from his lips, “and once in the evening.”

“I was lucky if the guard remembered to feed me once,” Claire said, and shook her head, tipping canned mangoes into her mouth.

“That why you were in here?” Grayson asked Steve, sipping water. “Looking for food?”

Steve nodded. “The guards always had food.”

“I’ve never seen teenagers in the prison before.”

Steve looked at him, finished off his baked beans. “Probably because,” he said, and swallowed his beans, “they didn’t help their dad steal data from Umbrella.”

“You stole data?” Claire asked.

“I’m kinda great with computers,” Steve said, and grinned. Then the grin vanished, and he continued, somberly, “Dad found a couple of guys who were interested in buying the data. We needed money bad. Bills and other problems were piling up, and the house was goin’ into foreclosure.” He paused, stared into his empty can as though he expected to find something worthwhile at the bottom of it. “Turns out the buyers were guys from Umbrella Internal Affairs,” he said. “My dad, he worked for Umbrella, and they apparently had an investigation goin’. Next thing I knew, guys in tactical gear were raidin’ our house. They killed mom, took us.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire said.

“Yeah,” Steve said, and sighed, “me too.” He looked at him, for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then said, “Wait, I know you.”

“You do?”

“You’re Alfred’s bodyguard,” Steve said. “I saw you tourin’ the compound with him once. Me and this guy Mickey. Mickey told me some shit, said you were crazy like Ashford.”

“He’s been good to me so far,” Claire said.

“I’m whatever Alfred needs me to be,” Grayson said, and shrugged. “Bodyguard, butler, confidant.”

“How can you be friends with that motherfucker?” Steve asked, staring hard at him. His eyes had that look of someone who had seen too much shit; he’d seen similar eyes on soldiers, on the survivors of Raccoon City: empty and dead, and, like shadows at the backs of their irises, a painful yearning for an end to whatever ghosts haunted them. For the last several months, his eyes had looked like that, too.

“It’s a long story,” Grayson said, shaking his head. “The short version? My dad was the Ashford’s butler, so I grew up with them.”

“You knew Alexia?”

He frowned, feeling a twinge of pain in his chest. “Yeah.”

“Alexia’s a hot topic among the prisoners,” Steve informed him. “Probably ‘cause none of the guys have seen a chick in forever, other than the guards. But you don’t fuck with the guards.” He paused, then said, “Dude named Frank copped a feel off some female guard, and she blew his head open. We had to scrub the brains off the wall. And let me tell you, man, brains are _not_ easy to clean up.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” Claire said.

Steve looked at her. “You don’t have a uniform,” he remarked. “How long you been here?”

“A week, maybe?” Claire said, shrugging. “They kept me in a solitary cell, after moving me from Holding.”

“The one by the graveyard?”

“Yeah,” Claire said, “that’s the one.”

Steve nodded.

“There’s an airport,” Grayson told them. “You could use that to get off the island.”

“Where?” Claire asked, looking at him. “They brought me in on a chopper. I don’t remember an airport.”

“It’s a hangar for seaplanes. Used by the executives, mostly. You can access it through the training facility. It’s—”

“I know the place,” Steve said. “I can fly, too. My uncle, he was a pilot, and I gotta thing for planes.”

“Then I guess you guys know where you’re going.”

“What about you, Grayson?”

He shook his head. “Alfred needs me.”

“Alfred’s a fucking psychopath,” Steve snapped. “But I guess you gotta be a psychopath, too, if you’re worried about him.”

“Alfred’s sick. Mentally ill. And, despite everything, he’s my closest friend, and I owe him. I’m all he’s got left.”

“That doesn’t absolve him of anything he’s done,” Steve said, flinging his empty can of beans aside. It dinged off the wall, settled beside a heap of discarded porn magazines, a dozen naked women smiling out from the last decade. “He killed people. Tortured them. And you’re sitting here, trying to make me feel sorry for the guy?” Steve stood up, scowled up into his face and tried to look intimidating; but the kid barely came up to his chest. “When I find him,” he said, a warning in his voice, “I’m feedin’ him a bullet. You try to stop me, I’ll feed you one, too, Harman.”

“Steve,” Claire said, and grabbed his skinny arm, “sit down.”

“It’s not so black and white,” Grayson told Steve, frowning. “But I don’t expect you to understand, kid.”

“You’re either wearing some serious rose-tinted glasses,” Steve said, raising his hackles like a pissed-off Chihuahua, “or you’re fuckin’ delusional, man.”

“Go to the airport,” Grayson told them, moving toward the door.

“Grayson, come with us,” Claire said.

“I’m all Alfred’s got, and he’s all I got.” Grayson paused, and then said, almost pleadingly, “I lost everything in Raccoon City, Claire. Let me at least have him. Please.”

“You still have Sherry,” Claire said. “She needs you, Grayson.”

“Tell her I love her, okay?” he said, standing in the doorway of the rec-center, feeling helpless, like a pendulum swinging endlessly between two lives.

“Annette wanted you to take care of her,” Claire said. “She wanted _you_ , Grayson. Not me. She told me that, right before she died: to bring Sherry to you. But Leon and I couldn’t find you anywhere. You’d just vanished.” She went quiet for a moment, and then said, “Do you know how bad that hurt Sherry?”

“Whoever Sherry is, Harman’s right, she’s better off without him,” Steve said. “The guy’s friends with a fucking monster, Claire. Same guy who put me and my dad here.” And then, suddenly, Steve gave a lurching, ugly sob, and said, “My dad’s probably dead, all ‘cause of Alfred. I lost shit, too, Harman.” He snorted back snot, eyes pink and wet, tears streaking the grime on his face. He balled his fists so hard that his knuckles turned white, dirty nails digging into his palms, making them bleed. “Fuckin’ asshole, actin’ like a fuckin’ martyr,” he said. “Fuck you, man. Fuck you and fuck Alfred. I hope he fuckin’ blows your head off.”

 _You're like those guys in the Middle-Ages, the ones who whip themselves._ “Good luck, both of you.”


	13. He's Got Me

He found Secretary James inside The Palace, partially eaten; had it not been for the laminated ID around his neck, Grayson would have never recognized him. His entrails had been pulled across the tile like stretched gray-pink noodles, and a zombie—he recognized the woman from the front-desk—lay a few paces away, half of her head gone: her brains curdled on the desk, on the softly glowing computer monitor, and the tile was sticky with blood.

“She came out of the bloody bathroom,” Alfred said, from above. “And then she found James. He was hiding in the broom closet.”

Grayson thought about what he’d said to the woman, earlier, about getting together with James,finding a grim sort of humor in it. _Gallows_ _jokes_. “I’m glad you’re okay,” Grayson said, meaning it. He pointed at the dead woman. “Your handiwork?”

“See? I don’t always miss,” Alfred said, in a rare display of humor, and with an even rarer smile. He walked, stiffly, down the steps, gripping the strap of his rifle-sling.

“Guess not,” Grayson agreed, and found himself smiling.

Alfred hugged him, which surprised Grayson, because Alfred never hugged anyone. “Good to see you in one piece, Grayson,” he said, and pulled away. He clapped him on the shoulders, an awkward male gesture of friendliness. “It’s getting bad out there.”

“No kidding. You manage to get us a way off this rock?”

“Umbrella,” Alfred said, darkly, “isn’t taking my calls, it seems.”

“Maybe the line’s broken,” Grayson suggested, doubting it. Spencer probably saw the perfect opportunity in this mess to get rid of Alfred, he thought, and so that was what the old fucker was going to do.

“Come on, you know as well as I do that Spencer is simply using the situation to his advantage,” Alfred said, as if he'd read his mind, meeting his eyes. Alfred’s eyes were, like Alexia’s had been, the color of dry ice. “He can simply blame the outbreak for my untimely demise.” He frowned suddenly, and said, “I think that girl Redfield had something to do with it, Grayson. This all happens as soon as she shows up? Seems far more than a simple coincidence.” Alfred paused, his mouth becoming a thin, hard line. “I found bodies in the power-station,” he told him. “H.C.F. That was written on their vests.”

“Oh, come on, Alfred,” he said, exasperated. “A nineteen-year-old kid orchestrating a military attack on Rockfort?”

“Her brother is Chris Redfield. Umbrella has a file on him. I looked it up,” Alfred said, hooking thumbs in his ammo belt, which glittered with several narrow, brass-colored bullets. “He’s been snooping around Umbrella Europe. Coincidental? I think not.”

“I knew Chris Redfield when I was with the R.P.D. He never mentioned the H.C.F.”

“Yes, but he was S.T.A.R.S then, wasn’t he? They no longer exist.”

“I doubt H.C.F, whatever it is, is connected to S.T.A.R.S, Alfred.”

“They all had to go somewhere, didn’t they?”

“Most of them are dead, Alfred. I’m telling you, there’s no connection to S.T.A.R.S. Umbrella’s gotta lot of enemies. Enemies, I’ll remind you, who want company secrets, and are willing to go to whatever lengths to get them. Maybe they’re connected to WilPharma or TriCell?” Grayson paused, and then said, “Besides, Chris wouldn’t put Claire in a position like this, not even to bring down Umbrella. He cares about her too much.”

Alfred said nothing, but Grayson could see, plainly, that he wasn’t convinced of Claire’s innocence. Everything, in Alfred’s head, was some elaborate plot against him. If he’d taken more of an interest in the internet, Alfred would have been one of those guys regularly circuiting conspiracy message-boards and IRC chats, discussing shadow-governments and insidious communism.

“Anyway,” Alfred said, finally, “I have another plan to get off this island. But first, we need to take care of Redfield.”

“Alfred, she has nothing to do with anything going on here.”

“And how would you know that?” Alfred asked, staring at him. “Are you in on it, Grayson?”

“Don’t be stupid, Alfred. You know I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” Alfred conceded, and for a moment, he even looked sorry.

“I owe you everything,” Grayson said, and meant it. “The Ashfords have been nothing but good to me,” he continued seriously. “You let me come back to Rockfort when I’d lost everything in Raccoon City. And before that, you’d made sure my father and I were taken care of. Gave us whatever we needed, when we needed it. Without you, I wouldn’t even have an education, man, and my dad would be dead. So no, Alfred, I would never betray you. You know that. I’d take a bullet for you.”

Alfred opened his mouth, closed it. He looked confused. “This is making me uncomfortable,” he mumbled, in typical Alfred fashion, and he turned around and started upstairs again. “I’m going to my office.” Then he started talking to himself, in Alexia’s voice—some kind of argument, by the sounds of it—and vanished.

Grayson leaned against a pillar and took out his wallet, from the pocket the dragonfly barrette still sat in, and opened it, staring at the faded Polaroid of Alexia he kept inside. “What the fuck would you do, Lex?” he asked. “He’s losing it, and I can’t do shit about it.”

“I don’t know how to get Alfred to stop,” Alexia told him. “He’s become so bloody clingy. It’s suffocating.”

They were riding in the back of a company vehicle, a black sedan emblazoned with the Umbrella logo, heading for a research conference in Raccoon City. They could have taken the rented Mercedes with Alfred and his father, but Alexia had wanted time away from Alfred, who had, of late, been up her ass more than usual.

The driver, some spook from Umbrella, disappeared behind a partition of tinted glass.

“I dunno,” Grayson said, shrugging. He was staring out the window, watching trees blur past, the occasional gas-station peering sadly out from some worn concrete lot.

“Can you look at me when I’m speaking to you? Please?”

Grayson looked at her. “Sorry,” he said.

“I think he’s worried about my research.” Something sad flickered in Alexia’s eyes, then, and then it was gone. “I’ve explained to him that I’ve taken all the necessary precautions to ensure my safety, but he doesn’t seem to grasp that.”

“I read somewhere that twins are tight-knit, moreso than regular siblings,” Grayson said, recalling something he’d read in a newspaper article about a twin who’d sensed their twin was going to die, and then they did, in a car crash a week later. “That they can feel each other, in some weird way. Maybe he’s feeling something bad?”

Alexia frowned, tucking a strand of white-gold hair behind her ear. “I just worry,” she began, folding her arms across her chest, “that Alfred won’t be able to function without me, should I ever need to go away for a long time.”

“Why would you ever need to go away?” he asked. “You’re the Chief Researcher in the Antarctica facility. Sounds tenured, you ask me. They passed up William Birkin to give you that job.”

“But I might need to go to another facility, at some point,” Alexia said, and looked at him. Again, something in her eyes that bothered him. “And that might keep me away for an extended period of time.”

“You suicidal, Lex?” he asked, seriously.

“No,” she said, and shook her head. “But Alfred might be, should I ever leave.”

“He’ll be okay. He’s got me,” Grayson said, closing his wallet and pocketing it.


	14. No Matter the Cost

Alexia was nervous. He knew that, because she'd been quiet the entire ride, her nose shoved between the pages of a book titled _Comprehensive Myrmecology_.

"You okay?"

She looked up from her book. "I'm fine," she lied.

"No you're not, Lex."

Beyond the tinted partition, the Eurythmics sang _Who's That Girl_ on the radio.

"You nervous 'bout the conference?"

Alexia sighed, laid the book in her lap. She wore a sober-looking blazer over a black sweater-vest. Her skirt was plaid, knee-length. The dragonfly barrette glittered in her hair, the ruby on her tie-pin. "Yes," she said.

"Don't sound like you. Lacking confidence in your work, I mean."

"It's not that I lack confidence in my work," she said. "What I lack is confidence in my colleagues' abilities to see the bigger picture, Grayson."

The outskirts of Raccoon City consisted of tidy suburbs, which gradually, like a slow-growing migraine, became an urban sprawl of concrete buildings, roads, overpasses, interchanges, and tall glass skyscrapers, several of which remained in various stages of incompleteness: steel skeletons glittering in the hot June sun. His dad had told him that, just twenty years ago, Raccoon City had been some hick-town that nobody had cared about, or had ever even heard of; now it was a household name, the nerve-center of the Umbrella Corporation, the world's biggest pharmaceutical giant.

"Hard to believe Umbrella built all this shit in such a short time," Grayson remarked, staring out his window. They were traveling along the I-40 Interchange, toward Uptown, past the Raccoon Sharks Stadium, its vast parking lot stretching out below like a dry tarmac seabed. "Why'd they call the home-team The Sharks?" he asked, idly. "Should've been The Raccoon Raccoons."

"Must everything have Raccoon in it, simply because we're in Raccoon City?" Alexia asked, and buried herself in _Comprehensive Myrmecology_ again.

"It's called a brand, Lex. Gotta market it."

The Umbrella building was the tallest skyscraper in Raccoon City, and stood at the heart of the business district in Uptown, its red-and-white hexagon looming above the city as a reminder to the people that it was Umbrella who owned them. That logo, he'd observed, was everywhere in Raccoon City. _Subliminal marketing_.

Alexia closed her book, inhaled, and then exhaled, slowly. She climbed out of the car.

"You'll be fine," Grayson told her, and checked the lining pocket of his blazer—once again—for his guest pass. "We're good," he added, before she could ask him if he had it.

They went in together. Albert Wesker, dressed like the frontman of some European new-wave band, walked over and smiled in that mimetic way only Albert Wesker could, as if he was copying a smile he'd seen once in a stock photo. His eyes, as usual, were screened by dark sunglasses, and he smelled of something metallic and clean.

"Little birdy says you're going to divulge some of your research, Alexia," Albert said, making a small adjustment to the ribbed band of his silver wristwatch. "I can't say I'm not curious. You've been very hush-hush about it."

"I'm only providing a precis," Alexia replied, holding a calfskin briefcase. "Just enough to whet The Board's appetites."

"You're running out of funding," Albert said.

Alexia said nothing, scowling.

"Funny," Albert continued, airily, "I thought the Ashfords had deep pockets. But word is your family's running quite low on money, thanks to your father's failures. Not much of a scientist, and bad with managing his finances, to boot. Tell me, how is Alexander?"

"Though I agree Alexander wasn't much of a scientist, he was still more of one than you are, Albert." Alexia smiled icily, then said, "How's Birkin? I heard he's your boss now."

"Birkin is doing quite well," Albert said, unfazed. "Shall we? The Board is convening."

Grayson followed them into an elevator crammed with suits from Umbrella, and the scientists who worked for them. He knew they were scientists, because they all had that harassed, tired look which came from long hours of work and high expectations. Conversely, the suits, in their designer cuts and Rolexes, looked well-rested and relaxed.

The elevator stopped. Alfred, as well as his father, were waiting for them outside a pair of polished double-doors, a brass placard indicating that the room beyond was the conference room. Grayson glimpsed inside: bored executives sat like gargoyles around a vast table of dark-lacquered wood, while a tech set up the projector. A couple of scientists were in there, too; though Grayson only recognized William Birkin, who glowered in his chair, a dusting of cystic acne on his chin.

"Alexia!"

"Not now, Alfred," Alexia said, ducking past him.

Alfred frowned, arms dropping to his sides.

"They're still setting up, princess," his father told Alexia. His father was a tall man, his tanned skin and dark, slicked hair evocative of the leading men of Golden-Age Hollywood. "Though they've prepared you a seat next to Dr. Birkin."

"Sounds like someone wants to stir the pot," Albert remarked.

"No pot is going to be stirred, Albert," Alexia said, pointedly. "I'm nothing but professional. Dr. Birkin, on the other hand, I can't speak for." She smoothed her tie, then went inside the conference room with Albert.

A few hours later, the suits trickled out of the conference room, talking quietly among themselves. They sounded annoyed, unimpressed, as if they were walking out of a very disappointing movie, and Alexia came out after them, quiet and stormy.

"Alexia?"

"Leave me alone, Alfred," she said, icily.

His father frowned, watched her go. Alfred looked hurt. Grayson dogged her heels, and said, "You okay?"

"I don't want to talk right now," Alexia said, and she didn't.

They rode the elevator down to the lobby, in uncomfortable silence. It was raining outside now. Alexia, ignoring the umbrella his father offered her, shouldered through the rotating door, stepping out into the downpour. Cars splashed past, and the lights of Raccoon City were watercolors on the pavement.

"Alexia!" Grayson said, running after her, opening the umbrella his father had tried to give her. "You're gonna get sick."

She stood on the curb, beside his father's rented Mercedes, and said nothing. Grayson held the umbrella over her head. Somewhere, distantly in the clouds, thunder rumbled.

"They mocked me," Alexia said, finally. "They mocked my research, Grayson. They said it was a waste of time and funding. That it was vanity work. Some of them even laughed."

Grayson didn't say anything. Alexia, he knew, wasn't used to rejection; she'd spent her whole life being praised as the Ashford family's messiah, the second coming of Veronica, that she'd forgotten what it was like to be criticized, to be humbled.

"You should have seen the look on William Birkin's face," she hissed, her fingers tightening around the handle of her briefcase, knuckles turning white. "So bloody smug, Grayson," she continued, shakily, as if she wanted to cry, but couldn't bring herself to do it. "They praised his research. Derided mine. G-Virus! His G-Virus is a bloody pipe-dream, Grayson. But T-Veronica isn't."

Grayson said nothing.

"Only Spencer showed interest in T-Veronica," Alexia said. "Only him. Even James Marcus scoffed at my work, and his research is barmier than mine. Leeches, Grayson! You know what they used leeches for?" She looked at him. "Quack-science, Grayson. That's what they used them for. For sucking out 'bad blood', because barber-surgeons were too stupid to understand the concept of bacteria. They used to swig piss from flasks, to determine what ailed someone! Piss! Piss and bloody leeches—"

"Calm down," he said, cutting her off. "People are giving you weird looks, you screaming curbside 'bout piss and leeches, and barber-surgeons." Grayson sighed, then said, "Spencer's the only one you need to impress, right? So this is a good thing, Lex."

"I'm going to show them," she said, determined. "I'm going to show them it was foolish for them to laugh at me. No matter the bloody cost."

Grayson watched Alfred at his desk. Alfred was watching the short film on his computer, of Alexia and him tearing apart the dragonfly, and he was crying, mascara streaking his cheeks. "No matter the cost, huh?"


	15. Scuffle in The Palace

He stared at the NO SMOKING sign, lighting a bent cigarette he’d found in his pocket. “Not like it matters anymore,” he remarked, blowing a cloud of smoke.

Alfred had worked himself upto hysterics, so Grayson had slipped out in the middle of the shit-show to enjoy the cigarette he’d forgotten he’d had, because even the littlest pleasures were luxuries now, in the middle of this zombie apocalypse; and the nicotine relaxed him anyway, settled his bad nerves.

His first cigarette had been one of his father’s Dunhills, at fourteen. Alexia had dragged him to some kind of Umbrella thing at the Spencer estate, and he’d gotten bored and had found his father’s cigarettes, and so he’d tried one. Alexia had caught him smoking on the terrace, and had lectured him, for what had felt like an eternity, about all the health problems associated with cigarettes, and how they were laced with chemicals and, she’d read in some article, even fiberglass. He’d worried that she’d tell his dad, but she’d promised not to, as long as he never did it again. And he’d promised he wouldn’t.

Grayson stared at the cigarette, which had nearly burned to the filter, feeling a weird sense of guilt.

He dropped it on the tile, ground it under his shoe.

The doors to The Palace creaked open. Automatically, he reached for his gun. Zombies, at least in Raccoon City, hadn’t puzzled out how doorknobs worked; but Grayson couldn’t be too careful.

Claire appeared, followed by Steve. “Grayson?” she said.

“Figured you would’ve taken off,” Steve said, mistrustful. He looked even worse in the light; the bruises stood out on his unhealthy pale like purple leopard spots.

“I thought I told you both to go to the airport,” he said, keeping his voice down. “Look,” he continued, and glanced up at the balcony, “Alfred’s up there. You gotta get outta here. He finds you, you’re both fucking dead.”

“We’re dead anyway, if we can’t get off this fucking rock,” Steve argued, quietly.

“Alfred must have increased security at some point, because we couldn’t reach the airport without his permission,” Claire told him. “Look,” she said, frowning, “we need to get there. Rodrigo, the guard? He’s hurt. Needs medical help, and the only way he’s getting that is if we get a fucking plane.”

“Rodrigo’s a dead man,” Grayson said, soberly. “The one doctor Rockfort did have is a fucking kook, and he’s probably dead anyway. Not like he could’ve helped Rodrigo. Kind of guy who’d saw your arm off if you said it hurt.”

“I haven’t seen that guy,” Steve said. “The doctor, I mean. Good fuckin’ riddance. Heard a guard say he’d fled the States after several malpractice suits were leveled against him.”

“We need to get into that airport, Grayson,” Claire said. “We need Alfred to change the permissions. Rodrigo said Alfred would be here. Maybe we can reason—”

“Reason with him?” Steve said, staring at her. “Are you dumb? Look at Rockfort, Claire! It’s a fuckin’ gulag.”

“You’re right,” Claire conceded, and sighed. “That was dumb.”

“There’s no way in hell Alfred’ll do that,” Grayson told them. “He upped security a couple months ago, around the time his first secretary kept asking about Alexia. Got real paranoid, changed it all up.” He paused. Grayson looked over at James’s corpse, and said, “He’s got an ID on him that could get you the clearance to get into the airport. Alfred’s second secretary. Used to handle the execs who’d fly in, because Alfred couldn’t be fucked to do it himself. I think he was just embarrassed. He’s been in hot water with his bosses, you see.” Graysonrealized he was rambling, and stopped. He looked at them and shrugged. “I’d give you my ID, but it won’t do you any good. Alfred revoked my airport clearance. Didn’t want me running away from Rockfort. So if I flew anywhere, it was always with him.”

“Jesus Christ,” Claire said.

“Some friend,” Steve said, sourly.

Grayson had felt trapped when he’d initially arrived, but either because he’d become complacent, or had just resigned to his circumstances, he’d eventually stopped thinking of Rockfort as a cage, and more as a zoo-exhibit meant to mimic an animal’s natural habit. The prison had never felt like home, of course, but Grayson never went to the prison anyway, unless it was for sex; he stayed in the mansion, because that felt like home, like an old habitat.

Claire wrinkled her nose, looking at the vague anatomical jig-saw puzzle that had once been Secretary James. “Guess I got no choice,” she said.

“Make it quick,” Grayson said. “I’ll try to keep Alfred distracted. He thinks you had something to do with the attack, Claire. He’ll kill you—”

Grayson heard a gunshot, saw Alfred standing atop the stairs, his Walther pointed toward the ceiling. “Are you conspiring with the enemy, Grayson?” he asked, holstering the Walter and readying his bolt-action. “You would betray the Ashfords,” he continued, pacing on the balcony, his voice resonating in the lobby, “after everything we’ve done for you? You absolute _ingrate_. You filthy, ungrateful Yank.” His voice caught slightly, and he said, “You dare—you _dare_ —toss it back in my face?”

“Nobody’s betraying you, Alfred!”

“Alfred!” Steve shot across the lobby like his ass had been lit on fire, his bare feet slapping on the tile. “I’m gonna murder you, you son of a fuckin’ bitch!” he screamed, running straight across a scree of jagged ceramic, from a coffee mug someone had dropped at some point, trailing blood. “Where’s my dad?” Steve demanded, his voice going hoarse. “What did you do with my dad!”

A laser grazed the tile, beading in Steve’s eye. Steve threw himself over the front-desk and landed in a heap on the floor, and Alfred’s shot missed, ricocheting off the ground and cracking part of the tile.

The laser swung through the air, then, trembling between Claire’s eyes like a nervous bindi. Grayson pushed her, and that shot missed too, chipping the marble pillar behind them.

“How dare you, Grayson,” Alfred said, and the laser swung on him, red cursor burning on his chest. Grayson felt his heart punching at his rib-cage. “They destroyed my island,” Alfred seethed, “and you’re _protecting_ them? Protecting these little _rats_?”

“They’re kids, Alfred,” Grayson said reasonably, and gave Claire a look: _ID,_ _pronto_ _._ Then he drew his gun and pointed it at her, and backed up toward the staircase, hoping Alfred wouldn’t shoot him in the back. “Get outta here,” he told her.

“Grayson,” Claire said, and made her way toward James’s corpse, her gun turned on him. “Don’t make me do this. Annette wouldn’t want this.”

“Alfred!” Steve yelled, from behind the front-desk. “Where’s my dad, you fucker? Where’s David Burnside?”

“Enough of your whinging, boy.” Alfred leaned over the French railing and stared at Steve, smiling like a skull.“Your father, like everyone else,” he taunted viciously, “isdead, another bloody statistic. He’s probably shambling around Rockfort as we speak, gorging himself on the other prisoners.”

While Grayson and Claire maintained their stand-off, Steve pulled a gun from his waistband and fired at Alfred. Grayson shoved Alfred to the floor, caught the bullet in his side.

It didn’t hurt, at first; but then the pain came, sudden and hot, burning intensely under his skin as though someone had taken an oxyacetylene torch to his insides. Warm blood seeped through his shirt, made the fabric stick to his skin, and he felt himself getting colder, number.

“Grayson?” Alfred sounded panicked. “Grayson, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have doubted you. Grayson, please—”

“How many times have you been shot now?” Annette smiled at him from the windowsill of his apartment that no longer existed, in the city that no longer existed, still smoking the same cigarette. Twilight glowed behind her in bloody purples and reds, and molten golds, and the smells of summer wafted up from the street.

“I lost count,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Hey,” he continued, “can I get one of those cigarettes?”

“It’s your dream,” Annette said, and shrugged.

He lit the cigarette in his hand, with a pack of tear-away matches advertising, in Old West font, Jack’s Bar. “I’m not dead yet if I’m dreaming,” he pointed out. “Means there’s brain activity.”

“Unless you believe in an afterlife,” Annette joked.

“I don’t.”

“Neither do I,” Annette said.

“Remember that eugenics shit you were talking about?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m starting to think there’s some truth to it, Annette.”

“Umbrella was founded on principles of eugenics,” Annette said. “They didn’t originally set out to make monsters. That happened because people aren’t meant to play God.”

“I think I’m gonna wake up soon,” he said.

“More than likely,” she agreed. “I love you, Grayson.”

He gasped suddenly, as if he’d just remembered how to breathe, and sat up. Grayson was sitting in Alfred’s bed, the blue silk duvet soaked and sticky with blood. A first-aid kit was opened beside the bed, on a rococo chair. Crumpled pieces of bloody gauze were strewn around the curved wooden legs.

Alfred entered the room, in Alexia-drag, and closed the door. “You’re alive!” he said, and rushed over, throwing his arms around him. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t make it, Grayson. Oh, I’m so relieved you’re all right. Dear Alfred will be glad to hear of your recovery, too. He was so worried. Overwhelmed, I think, with grief. You should have seen his poor face, Grayson, darling—”

“I’m still a little sore, Alexia,” he said, his side tender and hurting. Alfred had bandaged the wound with surprising care; Grayson guessed he’d committed his father’s lessons of wound-dressing to memory, after Alexia, when she’d been ten and just starting out with Umbrella, had badly gashed her leg on some lab equipment.

“Of course, I do apologize.” Alfred let go, staring at him. He looked confused. “You should have died.”

He winced, a rod of white-hot pain shooting up through his ribs. “Guess I just got lucky.”


	16. Intermission

"Hello, Scott Harman?"

"Yes?"

"You don't sound so good."

Scott coughed. It was a wet, rumbling cough. "Who is this?"

Wesker smiled. "An old friend. Tell me, where do you keep your research?" He looked at the guard, a man named Paul Steiner, bound to the chair. Blood jellied above Steiner's right eye, where Wesker had struck him with his pistol. "I was told you were using the labs here. Keeping tabs on your son's progress, I assume?"

Steiner moaned, blood bubbling in the corners of his mouth, through the cracks between his red teeth, spilling over his chin. Overhead, the ceiling fan turned slowly, making the shadows strobe on the rough plaster walls of the security office.

"Albert Wesker," Scott said, darkly.

"The very same."

"You died."

Wesker caught his reflection in the chrome of a coffee percolator, eyes glowing like hot coals. He took the dark sunglasses from the breast-pocket of his tactical vest and slid them over his eyes. "I did," he said. "But we're not here to discuss my situation, Scott. Where are you keeping your research?"

"What do you want with it?"

"Answers, Dr. Harman."

Scott coughed as though he was trying desperately to dislodge something big and uncomfortable in his chest. Then, "It's not there, Wesker."

"I'm not amused, Scott."

"Good."

"I suppose I'll have to ask Alexia, then. My current employer is quite interested in her. But me? She's unimportant to me, as is her research."

"Alexia is dead," Scott said, and paused for a length of time. Then, slowly, "What do you know, Wesker? Tell me—"

Wesker cut the call. He folded his cellphone, pushed down the antenna, and pocketed it, turning to Steiner. "Suppose you're not getting on that plane after all, Mr. Steiner."

Steiner mewled.

Wesker unceremoniously slit the man's throat with his S.T.A.R.S knife, and the security officer made a wet dying noise, then went limp, motionless, the contents of his esophagus spilling over his shirt. The fan's shadows pinwheeled above Steiner's corpse, the soft thrumming of the wooden blades filling the room.

Wiping the blade clean on Steiner's pants and sheathing it, Wesker left the office.

A row of dead payphones stood opposite the door to the security office, the dividers scrawled over in crude permanent marker hieroglyphs, and scratch-marks. His radio crackled; one of his men came over the line. "Sir? Echo Team's dead. Found them in the power-station, alongside a dead technician."

"Any word from Delta on the whereabouts of Alfred Ashford and Alexia Ashford, or Grayson Harman?"

"They're still searching, sir."

"Contact me when they're found."


	17. A Lead Home

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

Steve shrugged, hawked and spat a gob of phlegm on the ground. Rain pattered steadily around them. Flames crackled and sputtered, some component shifting within the frame of a burnt Jeep and settling with a plaintive groan. “I wasn’t aimin’ at Harman,” he said, finally. “He jumped in the way.”

“He bought us time,” Claire said, showing him the sticky, blood-flecked ID, Hank James’s laminate face gazing tiredly back at them. “To get this,” she added, slipping it inside the breast-pocket of her vest. “He helped us.”

“And took a bullet for Alfred,” Steve pointed out. “You really gonna trust some asshole takes a bullet for that psychopath?”

“Alfred’s all he’s got now,” Claire reminded him, frowning. “Not justifying…” She trailed off, feeling a pang of guilt. She’d meant to say she wasn’t justifying Alfred, justifying whatever he’d done to Steve’s father. But instead she decided not to say anything at all, because sometimes that was better than maybe saying something stupid.

As they walked through the gates of the training facility, they were greeted by the business end of an automatic. Rodrigo’s tanned face stared down the barrel, nut-brown eyes glazed with pain, bloodshot. Sweat pebbled on his skin, beading on his mustached upper-lip.

“Rodrigo,” Claire greeted, hands up. “Good to see you on your feet.”

“I thought you were a zombie,” Rodrigo said gruffly, lowering his gun and wincing. He groaned in pain, slumping against a rusting stack of fuel barrels.

Claire looked at the bandage taped to Rodrigo’s side, under his ribs, the gauze stained brown. “How’s your wound?” she asked.

“Hurts like a bitch,” Rodrigo hissed, looking to his right. Several zombies lay in the mud, twitching, skulls reduced to red pulp. “Cleared the area,” he said, and looked at her, something in his eyes flashing. “You get us a way into the airport?”

She showed him the ID. “Right here,” she said.

Rodrigo studied the card, dark features composed in a look of vacant intensity. “Yeah, I know—knew—him,” he said, and straightened up with sharp grimace, cursing under his breath. “That’ll work.”

“You sure you’re gonna make it, man?” Steve asked.

Rodrigo shook his head. “No,” he said. “But it’s better than sitting around and waiting to find out.”

“Claire.”

She looked at Steve, raising her eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“I can’t leave,” Steve said, frowning. He looked beaten-down, tired, and worried—all at once. “I need to find my dad. I can’t leave Rockfort without him.”

Claire reached out, and Steve flinched, unused, it seemed, to any kind of human contact which didn’t consist of fists or feet. She squeezed gently, then said, “I know you’re worried about your dad. But we can’t stay here.”

Rodrigo sighed, and when he moved, it was laborious, soft with the chinking of magazines in the pockets and pouches of his tactical harness. “Kid,” he said, brow furrowing. “We don’t got time. I feel for you, I really do. I lost my family to Umbrella as well. But the chances of him surviving—”

“You won’t be able to fly the plane without me,” Steve said, scowling hard at them. His hands curled slowly into fists. “You’re fucked if I don’t come. And I won’t come, not until I find my dad.”

Claire looked at Rodrigo, hoping for some kind of support, another vote in favor of leaving. But got nothing. “Your dad’s David Burnside, right?” Rodrigo asked, a gravity in his expression.

Something, a spark of hope, lit Steve’s face. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know where he went exactly, but we were holding him in Block Ten of the men’s compound,” Rodrigo told him. “He could still be there, hiding. It wasn’t hit as hard by the infected as other parts of the compound, mostly because it was already light on population. Alfred kept persons-of-interest there.”

“Why would Alfred give a shit about Steve’s dad?” Claire asked.

“Not sure. David, he mumbled a lot about some data he’d stolen, that Alfred was interested in it. Or maybe Umbrella was?” The guard shrugged, then winced again, doubling over. Sweat dripped in fat, oily beads from his face. “Fuck,” he groaned, squeezing his eyes shut and clutching his wound, “that hurts.”

“Need you to hang in there, Rodrigo,” Claire said, helping him stand up. He nudged her off him, and she moved away, toward Steve, settling beside him. “Don’t go dying on us, okay?”

“Going to try my best,” Rodrigo said, wiping his face on his thick forearm, his rifle dangling from its nylon sling.

“Guess we should get over to Block Ten.” Claire paused, offered the ID to Rodrigo. “Go ahead and secure us a plane. Probably safer than out here, and they probably got a first-aid kit.”

She knew it was a gamble, trusting an Umbrella employee with their only ticket off Rockfort; but unless Rodrigo knew how to fly, he wasn’t going anywhere. And despite his dubious occupation, Rodrigo seemed like a good guy. Claire had always had a good sense for that kind of thing, seeing the good in people, to the point Jill had once told her that it would kill her one day, that naivety and quickness to trust, if she wasn’t careful. But Jill had twelve more reasons, and two incidents at the hands of Umbrella,to be more jaded about the world than Claire did.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Rodrigo agreed, slipping the ID into a zippered pouch on his harness. “I’ll keep the plane warm.” He took something out of his back-pocket—a piece of fax paper that had been folded several times—and gave it to her. “I drew a map,” he said. “When I was back in the isolation cell. Sitting around like that was driving me insane, and I figured you could use it. It’s crude, but it’ll give you the gist of the prison’s layout.”

Claire carefully unfolded the map. The map consisted of several rectangles and squares which represented buildings and areas, and lines which represented the roads connecting them, all of it drawn in shaky blue pen. Rodrigo had crossed out areas that were blocked off. An area to the north of The Palace was crosshatched, a solid blue block in the middle of it.

“What’s the crosshatched area?” she asked, looking at him. “And the little blue block?”

“Alfred’s home,” Rodrigo said. “My father helped build the bridge that leads there, but I don’t know how to reach it. He died when I was young.” His expression guttered a moment, and then it was unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it.

“He wasn’t the only one Umbrella worked to death,” Rodrigo said, and shook his head sadly. “Back when the island was called San Amaro. A lot of people died transforming San Amaro into Rockfort.”

Claire said nothing, because there was nothing she could say.


	18. Intermission: Rock and a Hard Place

David toggled through camera-feeds, tracking the man in sunglasses, smoking the butt of a cigarette he’d found in the watchman’s ash-tray. Though the guy was definitely someone he wouldn’t fuck with under normal circumstances, his present circumstances were anything but normal. That guy—he'd been listening on another line, and the man on the phone had called him Albert Wesker—was their only way out of this shithole.

“To think I was just a fucking sysadmin couple of months ago,” David muttered. He flipped to another feed, a fug of smoke hanging around his head like a blue lenticular cloud. Albert Wesker was making his way through Block Six, with a couple of guys in tactical gear. Not USS, he was pretty sure. Steve wasn’t among them.

He wondered if it was too much to hope that his son had weathered the prison; the guys he’d seen, they’d looked half-dead, all bones and sun-baked skin like one of those bog-bodies he’d seen in television documentaries. And Steve was only seventeen.

David didn’t want to think about losing him too, not after he’d lost Donna, and so he stubbornly held on to hope. If he could just find that CD, the one full of his former employer’s dirty little secrets, maybe he could convince Wesker to help him find Steve and get them off Rockfort. His older sister lived in Pennsylvania. They could rebuild their life, and he’d spend the rest of his making it up to Steve.

But where could the guards have put the disc?


	19. Flash-Flood Revelations

He cut his hand open for the third time, watching the blood flower in his palm and drip between his fingers… And then the skin slowly knit together again.

"Jesus," Grayson murmured, and he did it again. The wound healed, smooth. "What in the fuck?" He stared at the unbroken skin of his palm, and wondered what sort of genetic fuckery was going on inside him right now, and whether or not it should worry him. He didn't feel any different...

The door opened. Grayson quickly tossed aside Alfred's paper knife and watched Alfred, who was Alfred again, step into the room. "How are you feeling, mate?" he asked, closing the door and sitting in the armchair beside the bed.

"All right," Grayson lied. "Little tired, but I'm okay."

Alfred nodded.

"So what's the plan?"

Alfred stared at him, then said, "Kill Redfield and Burnside, of course." He paused, however, his gaze drifting to the bloody paper knife on the floor, the bloodstains in the fibers of the carpet. His forehead creased, lips dropping into a frown. "Were you hurting yourself?"

"Not like that," Grayson said, and shook his head. He picked up the paper knife and demonstrated, cutting a line across his hand. The wound healed. Alfred stared, expressionless. "I don't know what's going on, man," he said. "I dunno whether to be scared or grateful."

Alfred sighed. "Suppose you'd find out eventually," he muttered, and looked at him. "My grandfather," he began, straightening up in the chair, "was a member of the Eugenics Education Society, and was an admirer of Francis Galton. Father, too. Grandfather initially wanted to make Umbrella into another Galton Institute—that's what they renamed the EES—but shifted his focus, instead, to the production of bioweapons at the behest of Spencer, as it was far more lucrative—"

"Get to the point," Grayson said, feeling his stomach drop somewhere near his bladder. "Please," he added.

"Your father subscribed to grandfather's idealogy, Grayson," Alfred said mildly, as if he was commenting on the weather. He laced his fingers together and smiled. "Scott was a researcher before he was a butler. So much for being a good Christian, hm?" Alfred laughed, then said, soberly, "He volunteered you as a baby to be the recipient of an experimental strain of the progenitor virus he and grandfather created, after it failed to have any effect on him. You were young, your cells malleable and fresh. His? It caused complications down the road." Alfred tapped his chest, where his heart was, and said, "Right here." He was quiet for a moment, and then, "That was why Spencer had my grandfather killed, Grayson. He wanted their research. How do you think Oswell ended up so sick?"

Grayson said nothing and stared at the floor, at the patterns and blood in the carpet. Annette had been right. But his own father? He buried his face in his hands. "Why not kill my father?" he asked, staring into the darkness of his palms, then opening his fingers and staring at Alfred through the cracks.

"Your father wasn't a founder, and Oswell needed someone around with intimate knowledge of the experimental strain," Alfred explained, shifting, the chair's wooden frame creaking softly. "Of course, it didn't do him any good. Your father hid his research."

_She's on ice…_

_Chess is a game of foresight and careful planning, dear Grayson._

_My maneuvers are always calculated._

_I play The Long Game._

_Spencer's last hope._

"Alexia is alive, isn't she?" Grayson blurted out, and stood up. He wasn't sure how he knew that, but he did, somehow, deep down in the core of him: that Alexia was alive, and that she had some sort of plan. A plan that predicated on Spencer's desperation for a cure, and his faith in her intelligence. He strode over to Alfred, scowling. "And she knew about this, didn't she?" he continued, angrily. "She knew about dad and this eugenics shit. Probably hid his fucking research, too. Maybe she was even in cahoots, had planned everything from the start."

"Alexia is dead, for the last bloody time, Grayson. You're raving."

Grayson turned away, marched out of the bedroom, and down the three flights of stairs. He needed some air, or he was going to punch Alfred, and then regret punching Alfred once the anger and the frustration left him.

Had this been the thing Alexia had told Alfred, before she'd died? Had Alexia been some eugenicist all along, with plans to turn him into some kind of weird fucking _Übermensch_? He knew the Ashfords prized pedigree above everything else, even to their own detriment, but Alexia had never been like Alfred in that regard. There had been times she'd even been alarmed by her brother's weird, manifesto-like monologues about the Ashfords and their "place" within the hierarchy of society. It didn't fit the Alexia he'd known…

Or maybe, he thought, Steve had been right: he was wearing rose-tinted glasses.

 _Or_ , something with his voice said, _Alexia_ _had been_ _used as some kind of pawn in her father's eugenics vision._

"Or maybe," he said, out loud, "she was just indifferent to it all?"

It was still raining, the air smelling of petrichor and smoke, and underneath that, of rot. Alfred stepped outside and stood beside him. "I didn't mean to alarm you, Grayson," he said evenly. "Simply thought you should know."

"What else did Alexia tell you?"

Alfred looked at him, sighed and shook his head. "Nothing much," he said. "I don't believe Alexia knew much to begin with. She found the notes when…" His words trailed off, and Alfred stared into the middle-distance, his expression unreadable. "When," he continued, somewhat shakily, "I found out about Code Veronica. The secret of our birth. She did some digging…"

"What secret?" Grayson asked, looking at him.

"Nothing," Alfred said.

Grayson didn't press Alfred to elaborate; something told him, in his gut, that he'd find out later. "So my dad was an Umbrella researcher," he said flatly.

"Yes," Alfred said, folding his arms across his chest. "He was a junior researcher who'd worked under my grandfather, Spencer, and Marcus. And then later, alongside my father, once Umbrella became an official company." He paused, frowning. "Your father was immensely talented in his field. But then you were born, and things went awry with his research and his personal life, and so he effectively retired from the position. Father gave him a job as our butler to keep him close, and he often assisted father with the Code Veronica project. It's safe to say, I think, father would have struggled to unlock the intelligence gene without your father's help. And without that intelligence gene, Alexia would have never become… became the girl we knew."

Grayson stared, then said, "You're telling me Alexia was genetically-engineered. Like in fucking sci-fi movies."

"Indeed," Alfred said, nodding. "Grayson," he continued, and looked at him as if he'd said something stupid, "when was the last time you'd met a small child who understood logarithmic functions?"

"Exactly zero. Good point," he said. Then, "Was I part of this project? This Code Veronica thing?"

"No. Your father's research predated Code Veronica by a decade. Scott employed the knowledge he'd gained from those experiments in Code Veronica. Without his insights, I doubt father would have made such quick progress."

"What was the point of it all?" he asked.

"Selfishness. Why else does anyone do anything? There's no such thing as altruism, Grayson. Everyone wants something: fame, professional acclaim, reputation, and so forth. Selfishness is the impetus of progress, and that is the bitter truth."


	20. He's Getting a Bullet

“Block Ten should be through here,” Claire said, folding Rodrigo’s map and sliding it into the back-pocket of her jeans. She could hear at least half a dozen zombies groaning and shuffling around on the other side of the gate.

The gate was a thick slab of metal framed in a wall of water-stained concrete, at the end of a narrow alley between the grimy, wet brickwork of barracks. Sparks erupted from the fraying wires of a keypad mounted on the door; someone had smashed it, the keys lying on the ground like broken teeth. “No gettin’ through it as is,” Steve remarked, hawking and spitting a gob of phlegm into a puddle. He put his hands on his hips, looking up at the top of the concrete wall. A spool of rusting barbed wire bristled up there, chunks of bloody flesh gumming the barbs. “Someone hopped it, smashed the keypad to keep the zombies in there.” Steve looked behind him, then said, “Probably went into one of the barracks and bled to death.”

“Maybe we should—”

“We’re here to look for my dad,” Steve said, staring at her, streaks of grime on his face like camouflage paint. “Whoever hopped the fence, he’s dead and an asshole anyway.”

“You’re an asshole, too, but you didn’t deserve Rockfort,” Claire countered, grinning. She looked around, then said, “Hoist me up.”

“You’re kiddin’. You want tetanus? ‘Cause that’s how you get tetanus.”

“Tetanus would be the least of my problems. Anyway, not over the wall, dumbass,” Claire said, pointing up. “Onto the roof of the barracks. Come on, help me up. I’m smaller than you.”

Steve created a stirrup with his hands, and Claire stuck her foot in it, clambering onto the shingled roof of the barracks. She leaned over the side of the building, seeing a handful of zombies milling around, and a few misshapen, bloody lumps of what had once been guards—but now were pulled pork and sloppy joes. “Counting about seven zombies!” Claire called to Steve. “Nothing too crazy.”

“Any sign of people?” Steve called back.

Claire scanned the ground again, seeing nobody. “No,” she said. “Not seeing anyone.”

“Help me up!”

She hooked her arm around a cluster of flue pipes, leaning over the side and sticking out her hand. Steve climbed up onto a stack of pallets and crates, and jumped, missed, and then jumped again, this time catching her hand. Claire pulled, digging her feet into the asphalt shingles, tightening her arm around the flues. Steve wriggled onto the roof with a grunt, then stood up. “You’re heavier than you look, asshole,” Claire said, grinning and letting go of the flues. “Can I have my hand back, please?”

He blinked, released her hand. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

The razor wire was about three or four feet across, and the drop about twenty. “We’re not gonna make that jump without either landing on the fucking razor wire, or somehow managing to clear it but breaking our legs.” Claire frowned, then said, “Think the only way we’re getting over is to open that door somehow.”

“Maybe we can find a crowbar or something in the barracks,” Steve suggested, helpfully. “The guards would have tools and shit like that. In case the electronic locks were disabled and they needed to get through a door, pronto. I know some of the doors get real rusty, too. All the rain.”

“Probably our best bet,” Claire agreed, making her way over to the edge of the roof. Getting down, she found, was easier than getting up. Gripping the edge, she lowered herself toward the ground, then dropped, and Steve did the same.

A loud crash came from the barracks. Claire took out her gun and opened the door.

Peering inside, she saw someone had knocked over a table, shattered a television on the worn floorboards. A humped shadow lay beside the overturned table—a man, Claire realized, in ragged prison clothes, the tattered fabric stained with old blood the color of rust—motionless, his legs shredded to the bone. They’d found the fence-hopper, she decided, fingering the trigger.

It was hot inside the barracks, and smelled of unwashed laundry and stale beer, and underneath that, of sweat and rot. The dark shapes of furniture cluttered the room, a wedge of sodium light, from a strip above the doorway, spilled across the floorboards, and the glow of the lampposts filtered through the sooty, fly-specked windows.

The man groaned, pulled himself to his feet. Dead. His eyes were like the glaucous eyes of deep-sea fish. He hadn’t died that long ago, however, that much she could tell; decomposition hadn’t fully settled in yet. Claire could still make out the details of his face: middle-aged, his features lined with stress and worry, set slightly asymmetrical. Bell’s Palsy, she guessed, or the by-product of a stroke.

“Dad,” she heard Steve say, behind her.

Steve’s father, his mind deteriorating lobe by lobe from the T-Virus, made no acknowledgment of Steve. He gurgled, blood bubbling in the corners of his mouth and dribbling onto his collar, and stretched out his hands.

Claire, though she wished it could have ended differently, pulled the trigger, and part of his father’s head dissolved into a cloud of blood. The body rocked back on its heels, then toppled backward,convulsing on the floorboards as the last microns of the T-Virus burned out, stiffening into rigor-mortis.

She was reminded of her own father, then, lying in his casket. How he’d looked unrecognizable to child-her, a wax-figure simulacrum of her daddy.Claire put her gun away, feeling as if she’d just committed murder.

Steve dropped to his knees and cried like a child, tears streaking the grime on his face. “I blamed him for gettin’ us in this mess, and he did, but… now—” his voice caught “–I can’t even tell him how much that pissed me off. How much he fucked up.”

Claire opened her mouth to say sorry, but then remembered sometimes it was better to say nothing at all, and so she didn’t.

Steve touched the ruin of his father's head, his hand coming away sticky with blood. “This is all Alfred’s fault,” he said, bitterly, snorting back snot. “This is all that fucker’s fault.” He looked up at her and scowled, his eyes pink and rimmed with tears. “You still feel bad for that motherfucker?” he asked, through his teeth, his nose dripping. “You still think I should feel sorry for him?”

“I never said—”

“You never _said_ it, but the fact you didn’t lemme put a bullet in his head back there? That said enough.” He wrapped his arms around his father and sat the corpse up, and gave an ugly, lurching sob. “You see this? You see my dad, Claire? Alfred did this.” Steve stared, hard, at her, and then he laid his father back down. “First mom, now… now it’s dad.” Another sob escaped him, and he absently smoothed the wrinkles in his father’s shirt. “Wait,” and he sniffed noisily, taking something from the breast-pocket of the shirt: a CD. Steve stared at it, expressionless. “This,” he said, “is what got us here.”

“Steve?”

Steve looked at his father and said, shakily, angrily, “You weren’t even lookin’ for me, were you? You were lookin’ for your fuckin’ disc.” He went to throw it.

Claire grabbed his arm and said, “If that’s the data, don’t.” When she was sure Steve wouldn’t chuck it, wouldn’t destroy their only hope of fucking over Umbrella, she let go of him and said, “If you wanna really hurt Umbrella? We’ll need that. You owe your dad that. We owe Raccoon City that.”

Steve pushed the disc into her hands. “You take it,” he said, and wiped his eyes and stood up. “I don’t wanna fuckin’ see that thing.”

She nodded, slipped the disc into the lining pocket of her vest. “I know people who can do something with it.” Jill would want to see it, she knew; she’d been waging war on Umbrella since the Mansion Incident, and had doubled-down on her mission after the Raccoon City Incident by building her case against Umbrella, by testifying against them in court. And if her brother came, as Claire knew he would, he’d want to see the data, too. “We should get back to Rodrigo,” she told him. “There’s nothing left for us here.”

“No, there’s somethin’,” Steve said, thrusting a dirty finger in her face, a certain unhinged craziness in his eyes. “I’m gonna kill Alfred.” He licked his chapped lips. “We don’t leave until I do. Unless you or Rodrigo suddenly know how to fly planes.”

“Steve, if we get this data to Jill, we can take Alfred to court over this. Him, and all the other assholes in charge.”

“Who the fuck is Jill?”

“The only person who can do shit about Umbrella,” Claire said.

“No deal,” Steve said, and shook his head. “Alfred? Umbrella? They got money.” He rubbed the pads of his thumb and finger together in the universal sign for cash. “M-o-n-e-y,” he said, spelling it out slowly. “The get-outta-jail-free-and-do-whatever-you-want kind of money. They’ll never see a fuckin’ prison. The court shit’s all pageantry. Gotta keep the public convinced that everyone’s held to the same standards, you know?”

“Steve, if you kill Alfred, you think the Ashfords are just gonna be okay with that?”

“Alfred’s the last of his shitty family,” Steve said.

“Nobody is the last of their family,” Claire countered, frowning. “From what I got, they’re one of those European dynasty families like the fuckin’ Rothschilds. Even if his sister’s dead, he’s probably got cousins, uncles, aunts, or whatever. And a family like that? Bound to have some relatives in the US government.”

“I got nothin’ left to lose,” Steve said. “Alfred? He’s gettin’ a goddamn bullet, and so is that asshole butler.”


	21. In the Corner, with Nowhere to Go

Grayson weaved in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams he could only remember shreds of: his father praying, Alexia smiling from behind a microscope, Annette sitting in his window, framed by summer twilight… It was as if his mind was trying solve a complex jigsaw puzzle, but couldn’t quite fit the pieces together, and when he’d finally slept and dreamed of nothing, Grayson supposed his brain had finally given up altogether on the task.

He woke to Alfred in his Alexia-drag, leafing through the pages of a worn leather-bound book, the pages yellowing and crisp with age. “I’m sorry,” he said, in his approximation of his sister’s voice. “Alfred told me that he’d told you about the project. About your father.”

“It’s fine,” he lied. Grayson looked at the book and asked, “What’s that?”

“My diary,” Alfred said.

Grayson stood up faster than he’d meant to. “May I see it?”

Alfred stared at him, then closed the book, which had one of those leather straps with a keyhole, and passed it to him. “Normally,” he said, “I wouldn’t dare share my private thoughts with anyone—even you—but in light of the circumstances, I think it would prove an enlightening read.”

“Thanks,” Grayson said, and meant it. The cover had Alexia’s name on it, embossed in gold, and the book was about the size of his hand. Custom-made, he thought, just like everything else the twins’ owned, and it was small enough for Alexia to carry in the pockets of her lab coats and sweaters. “Did you bring this from Antarctica?” he asked, and glanced at Alfred. He remembered seeing Alexia write in it, once, and when Grayson had asked her about it, she’d quickly hidden it as if he’d caught her with a porno mag and had told him it was none of his business.

“Yes,” Alfred said, “I didn’t want to leave it there.”

“Mind if I read it alone?”

Alfred opened his lipsticked mouth, closed it, and nodded hesitantly. “All right,” he said, and stood up. “But be quick about it, darling.”

“I will,” he said, and watched Alfred go.

He opened the diary, his hand trembling slightly. The first page was written on the day after Alexia’s graduation, and read, in Alexia’s rushed, spidery cursive:

 _May_ _17 th_ _, 19_ _80_

 _I spoke with one of my professors, and he suggested it would be a good idea to get in the habit of writing a research diary. Initially, I planned to do just that, but as I mulled it over, I_ _would_ _prefer_ _writing about my personal life_ _instead_ _. I’ve no other place to speak of it but in this diary, and I rather not leave a record of my research in such an unsecured place_ _anyway_ _. For my research, I’ll record events on a voice-recorder…_

Nothing particularly interesting, he decided. Grayson turned the page; the next entry was dated the 20th of May, 1980.

 _…_ _Umbrella offered me the position of Chief Researcher at the Antarctica Facility, though I’m hardly surprised. Undoubtedly, Spencer wants to ‘keep it in the family’, I suppose, as nobody knows this place better than the Ashfords. Except for the Harmans, I imagine._ _Scott used to be a junior researcher here, years ago._

Grayson sat down in the chair Alfred had previously occupied, in the corner of the room, and turned another page. Alexia went into details about her thoughts on Umbrella as a company, on Spencer, on her own father and the tumbledown legacy he left for her to repair. None of them were particularly good opinions; she seemed to hold a lot of animosity toward Spencer and her father.

 _November 12_ _th_ _, 1980_

 _Spencer is wasting my talent on this T-Virus research. The Progenitor strain he’d sent me is unstable to say the least; it’s little wonder grandfather died from it._ _But I digress, the purpose of this diary isn’t to speak of my research; I have my voice-recorder for that._

 _Grayson is getting a bit stir-crazy_ _,_ _which hardly surprises me; this isn’t the kind of life he deserves, being locked away in Antarctica with my brother and I. Though, as selfish as it sounds, I’d have it no other way. I like Grayson. I like being around him and listening to that funny New York accent of his. He says it’s not a New York accent, but it sounds like one,_ _like in_ _The Godfather..._

Grayson smiled. He’d often teased Alexia about her accent, and she’d always smiled and countered that he had an accent, too; it had been a sort of game between them, a running joke. He kept reading, skipping a few pages here and there, and sometimes whole chapters when there was nothing that really piqued his interest; he could read through the more mundane details later, he decided. Preferably with some scotch.

He frowned. That had been the first he’d thought about alcohol since he’d cold-turkeyed. Shaking his head, Grayson continued reading, swinging his legs up over the carved armrest of the chair. He heard Alfred thumping around downstairs, in another one of his moods.

 _February 17_ _h_ _, 198_ _3_

 _My brother and I have finally managed to get inside father’s laboratory. I knew my suspicions were warranted; we found his notes regarding the Code: Veronica project. I don’t know how I should feel about it, only that I hate my father. He created me to fix his blunders. I’ve been nothing more to him than a genetically-engineered Pinocchio,_ _a tool to repair t_ _he_ _Ashford_ _family’s_ _reputation_ _. Not a daughter, but a means to an end._ _Even so, at least I was wanted, if only to be used. Not even Alfred can say that._ _I feel terribly for_ _him_ _; he was never meant to be, an unintended by-product of the experiment. I can already see that the news has affected him deeply; he won’t speak to me, nor to Scott,_ _and has_ _shuttered_ _himself_ _away in his room_ _._ _Even Grayson can’t seem to jostle_ _Alfred_ _out of his mood_ _with his_ _ribald jokes and_ _his_ _infectious smiles_ _._

 _I don’t blame_ _Alfred_ _for being angry_ _at_ _father,_ _at Scott_ _. Scott helped father with this project_ _,_ _yes, but u_ _nlike father, I don’t think Scott s_ _ees_ _us_ _as_ _a successful experiment_ _._ _He sees us as_ _real children—his children—_ _a_ _nd for that, I am grateful..._

Grayson kept going; the next entry that caught his attention was a long one, written hastily.

_March 3, 1983_

_Father is gone, and Alfred seems in better spirits now. But he won’t be for long, and neither will Grayson; I’m beginning to reach a critical juncture in my T-Veronica project,_ _and it will require major changes_ _._ _I would rather keep Grayson ignorant on the matter, as he’s such a sensitive boy, but I can’t, I think, entirely entrust my brother with the matter._ _Alfred is beginning to display a worrying downshift in personality and efficacy._ _I’ll have to think on it._

 _I’ve been reading more into father’s research,_ _and have_ _found some disturbing details_ _regarding Grayson, but details that explain so much. Code: Veronica was, essentially, inspired by my grandfather’s eugenics experiments in the early sixties. Scott had been involved in a project bankrolled by my grandfather called Project_ _Darwin_ _, which later became The Wesker Project, under Martin Wesker._ _Or, rather, Project Darwin inspired Project Wesker…_ _Scott had been working on an early_ _P_ _rogenitor strain he’d called_ _Origin_ _, and Grayson was its first—and only—recipient… Scott had attempted to inject himself with this_ _P_ _rogenitor_ _derivative_ _, but from what_ _I understand_ _, nothing came of it._ _I suspect further details can be found in Scott’s research diary, but I don’t know where he keeps it,_ _and he won’t answer my questions_ _._ _He simply tells me that_ _it’s_ _something he regrets_ _and that he doesn’t want to talk about it_ _._

 _I did, however, learn something that has left me quite shaken._ _Apparently, my father made some sort of deal with Scott, or perhaps my father simply planned to carry it out himself behind Scott’s back. Father wanted to involve me in Project Darwin, use me as some sort of Mitochondrial Eve,_ _once I was, as his notes say, ‘old enough’…_ _His notes suggest that Code: Veronica was simply a continuation and re-branding of Scott’s work. My father couldn’t even be original in his research either, it seems! Once again, he used someone else_ _for his own ends._ _I’m not sad that he’s gone…_ _I’ll have to keep digging._ _But I sometimes worry I’ll_ _wake_ _a Balrog..._

The door banged open, and Steve stepped into the room. Slowly, Grayson rose from the chair and secured Alexia’s diary, staring at him, at the gun pointed at his head.

“Where’s Alfred?” Steve demanded, staring coldly at him down the sights of the gun.

“So that was all the thumping around I heard,” Grayson said, stowing the diary inside his blazer. “He’s not in here.”

“Steve!” Claire appeared in the doorway, blood dripping from her nose, lip split in the middle. She looked at Grayson, bewildered. “Grayson?”

“What happened to your face?” he asked.

“The stock of Alexia’s rifle,” Claire said, and she spat blood on the carpet, wiping some it from her mouth on the back of her hand. “Caught me by surprise when I came through the door.” She looked at him. “I thought she was dead.”

“First we get Alfred, then we worry about his crazy fuckin’ sister,” Steve said, approaching Grayson and, emboldened by the fact he’d caught him off-guard, pushing the muzzle of the gun against his head. “My dad’s dead, asshole,” he said, icily. “Because of Alfred, your buddy.”

Grayson put his hands up, palms turned out. A bead of sweat slid down the side of his face. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said, with a calmness that surprised him.

“But you let him do it!” Steve snapped, and struck him with the pistol. “You let Alfred kill my dad, fucker,” he said, and hit him again, harder, drawing blood.

“Steve, stop!” Claire shouted.

Grayson’s head swam, vision fuzzing around the edges, and then Steve was beating him, repeatedly pistol-whipping his head until he couldn’t stand anymore, legs buckling underneath him as though his torso was made of lead. Warm blood oozed down the side of his face. Claire was struggling to wrestle Steve away from him, her arms wrapped around the teenager’s waist, pulling, her feet sliding on the hardwood and the carpet.

There was a relief in the wall opposite him, of a woman in a himation, and behind that relief was a secret door which connected the twins’ rooms. It opened, then, and Alfred, still convinced that he was Alexia, appeared. There was some sort of dialog, but Grayson couldn’t hear what was said over the blood throbbing in his ears, and then an exchange of gunfire. Alfred retreated through the passageway, and Steve and Claire chased after him.

Pushing himself to his feet, Grayson wobbled toward the relief and shouldered through it, the stone turning like a revolving door, and then he was standing in Alexia’s room, among the lobotomized stares of her porcelain dolls, and her opulent rococo treasures. The smell of perfume and wood congealed in the air. His head ached, white-hot pain searing the cortexes of his brain, crystallizing in front of his eyes and bursting.

Alfred had discarded Alexia’s wig and dress. Himself again, he ambushed Claire and Steve, but Steve side-stepped and shoved Alfred face-first into an antique Cheval mirror. The glass shattered, and when Alfred glimpsed his reflection in the remains of the mirror, he wailed as if waking from a nightmare and rushed from the room, not even sparing Grayson a glance.

Steve swung his gun on him. Claire stepped between them and said, “No.”

“Alfred got away,” Steve hissed. “So at least I can get the fuckin’ butler.”

“Grayson isn’t a bad guy, Steve,” Claire said, gesturing for him to lower the gun.

Grayson leaned against the wall and prodded, experimentally, at his skull. Several deep gashes, where the gun had split his scalp, but the skin was already beginning to knit back together. The blood down the side of his face had jellied, sticking unpleasantly to his skin like epoxy glue. “I wouldn’t say I’m a good guy either,” he said, grimacing. “I need to go after Alfred.”

“Grayson, forget him,” Claire said, looking at him. “The guy’s fucking insane. Come with us. Sherry’s waiting for you.” She glanced at Steve, who had put his gun away, and then she turned to him and said, “We’ve got a plane already, Grayson. Rodrigo, that guard? He’s already aboard it, waiting for us.” She grinned; the cracks between her teeth were red. “Even better? We have dirt on Umbrella.”

“Dirt?”

Claire nodded. “Steve’s dad, remember? That data he stole. We’re gonna give it over to Jill and my brother.”

He knew she’d brought up Jill to entice him to come along; but that was in the past, and Jill hated his guts anyway. Not that Grayson blamed her for that; he’d hurt her bad, when she’d done nothing to deserve it. “I can’t,” he said. “My loyalty’s to the Ashfords. I’m sorry, Claire.”

Her expression collapsed, a question in her eyes. “Why?” she said, finally. “Doesn’t Sherry mean anything to you anymore? It was Annette’s dying wish, Grayson. Her fucking last wish. She wanted you to take care of Sherry.”

Sherry meant everything to him, but so did Alfred. “I’m sorry,” was all he managed to say.

Claire shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you.”

“I can. Forget him,” Steve said. “We need to find Alfred.”

“If you go after Alfred,” Grayson said, staring at Steve, “then I don’t have a choice but to stop you, kid.”


	22. An Intermission Where Alfred Remembers Something Important

Grayson found Alfred in his office, fighting off three zombies in tactical gear. One pushed him onto his desk, and Alfred gritted his pearly whites, his face flushing and mascaraed eyes bulging, and he used his rifle as a sort of bar—one hand on the barrel, the other on the stock— between himself and the zombie, pushing hard, trying and failing to shove it away.

Reaching for his gun, Grayson shot it in the head, and the zombie reeled back and splayed on the floor.

Alfred beat the other two back with his rifle, buttstroking one in the head until its skull cracked and caved, and it sank to the floor. And then he launched himself at the other one in a crazed fit, bludgeoning its head until the bone crunched into splinters and the squelch of brain-pulp filled the room, his face and the front of his uniform splattered in a Rorschach of blood.

The stock of his rifle was crusted with blood and clumps of hair. He stepped back from the bodies, sweating and panting, his smooth white forehead glittering with a film of damp. Some of his hair had come loose, curling over his sweat-browned hairline, and the makeup on his face was smudged and runny.

“How long?” he asked suddenly, without looking at him.

Grayson realized he hadn’t lowered his gun; but what scared him was that he didn’t want to. “Alfred?” he said, cautiously.

Alfred whipped around to face him, and Grayson thought he was going to charge, lunge at him like some kind of starved lunatic animal. But Alfred did nothing but stand there, trembling in rage. “How long?” Alfred screamed, the vein in his neck bulging, his voice spiking to the highest point of its falsetto and nearly cracking.

There was something profoundly jarring, Grayson decided, in seeing Alfred like that: crazy-eyed and make-upped, lost under a fresh coat of blood. “It started getting bad when you came to Rockfort,” Grayson said, finally. “You didn’t stick to your psychiatrist’s medical regimen, man, and that’s what happens. Shuttering yourself away on Rockfort, you developed this Alexia as a way to cope with the isolation. She was your only friend, right? Besides me. And there was no reason to pretend you were me, because who would want to?” He laughed sardonically.

“I’ve… been parading around as my dear sister that long?” Alfred said, as if he couldn’t quite believe that. “Since I took over Rockfort?” He paused, his forehead creasing. Then he looked at him, something accusatory in his eyes. “How could you have let this go on, Grayson?”

“Because you didn’t want help,” he shot back, all of his anger suddenly bubbling up and spilling over. “You told your psychiatrist to fuck off, went off your regimen of meds, and took a fucking swan-dive off the deep-end. Your psychotic episodes were too much for dad, too much for me. I went to Raccoon City, Alfred, precisely because I couldn’t take your crazy shit anymore.”

Alfred suddenly swung on him, fist connecting with his jaw. “Then why did you come back?” he shouted, and swung again, this time smashing his fist into his temple, making stars pop and fizzle out in his field of vision. “Why not stay in the bloody United States with that slag, Jill?”

Grayson’s jaw hurt, and so did his head. “Because I care about you more than I do her, Alfred,” he said, and meant it. _Actually,_ something with his voice said, _my life_ _and everything that_ _had mattered went_ _up in_ _that mushroom cloud,_ _not to mention_ _the_ _second_ _love of my life_ _had_ _died. Where else was I go_ _nna_ _go?_ When he was sure Alfred had settled down, Grayson stuck his gun into his waistband, the grip slanted across his lower-back.

“I’m sorry, Grayson,” Alfred said, suddenly.

“I’ve been hit in the head before,” he said, rubbing his sore jaw, then his sore temple. “Nothing new. I used to be a bouncer at a pretty rough dive before the R.P.D.”

“I mean for everything,” Alfred said.

Grayson nodded. He wanted to say it was okay, but it wasn’t okay, and never had been. He’d simply become accustomed to the situation, in the same way people from broken homes became accustomed to broken lives. “Will you get help?” he asked, after a lengthy silence. “You need it, Alfred. Not for me, but for yourself. What happened back there at the mansion’s proof enough of that.”

Alfred didn’t say anything right away; he seemed to be absorbed in thought. Then, slowly, realization crept into his expression, as if he was gradually remembering the pieces of something important, and he smiled, not at Grayson, but to himself. “Yes,” he said, finally. “I’ll get the help.” His pale eyes met Grayson’s. “But I need to do something.”

“If you say ‘kill Redfield and Burnside’, I fucking swear I’ll deck you, Alfred.”

He shook his head. “No,” Alfred said, “I suddenly remembered something more important than that. What’s the date today, Grayson?”

“December 27th,” he said.

“Just a few more hours, then,” Alfred said, and giggled.


	23. Goodbye, Rockfort

Grayson had never expected to see Albert Wesker again, yet the man approaching them cut the same imposing figure, maintained that familiar air of a man who knew he was always in control.

“You’re difficult men to find,” Albert said, his expression incalculable under the dark sunglasses. He wore matte-black tactical gear—the same gear the zombies in Alfred’s office had been wearing—and his blond hair, as it had always been for as long as Grayson had known him, was neatly combed back. “I’ve been tracking you on surveillance cameras,” he said, strolling across the lawn. And then he came to a stop, about twenty yards away from them, and said, “Now that I’ve found you both, all that’s left is Alexia. Where is she, Alfred?”

“Dead,” Alfred replied, reaching for his gun, for the Walther on his hip.

Before Alfred’s fingers could even brush the grip, Albert hurtled across the yard at a speed that could only be described as superhuman and kicked Alfred so hard in the stomach that he doubled-over and vomited on the flagstone. “I’m not going to ask again,” Albert said, grabbing a fistful of Alfred’s hair and yanking him straight, so their eyes met. Something like beads of dying laser light flickered restlessly under the tinted lenses. “Where is your sister?”

“I already told you,” Alfred said, through his teeth. “Dead.”

Albert punched him, the motion so quick that Grayson’s eyes didn’t even register it, bloodying Alfred’s nose. “Alexia,” Albert said smoothly. “Where?”

Alfred wriggled helplessly in Wesker’s hold like a fish caught on a line. Blood gushed from his nostrils, pooling on his upper-lip. “I told—”

Albert made a fist, went to punch him again. Grayson launched himself at Wesker, tackling him to the lawn. Alfred scrambled for his bolt-action, which he'd dropped when Albert had kicked him, and fumbled to load a bullet into the chamber. Grayson straddled Albert and struck him in the face, then swung again, but Albert caught his arm this time, rolled, and kicked him away. He skidded across the wet grass.

A gunshot cracked, and Albert’s chest exploded in a cloud of blood. But he kept walking, ignoring Alfred and the wound. “This is getting tiresome,” Albert said, and he seized him by the shirt and dragged him across the lawn, then hurled him into a lamppost, the metal giving way and snapping under the impact. Then Albert wrenched him to his feet and bent him over the jagged stump of the lamppost, his throat hovering inches above a sharp protrusion of metal. “Tell me where Alexia is,” Albert was saying to Alfred, “or I’m going to drop Harman on this stake.” Albert spoke so dispassionately about impaling him that he might as well have been commenting on the weather. Then, to him, “No hard feelings, Harman. This isn’t personal, I assure you.”

“Sure,” Grayson said, and tried to pull his head back. But Albert didn’t let him; his fingers were like pneumatic claws. A fat bead of sweat slipped down the aquiline slope of his nose as he imagined himself falling on the spike, choking on metal and blood.

“Don’t,” Alfred said.

“Then tell me what I want to know,” Albert said. “I know Alexia is alive, Alfred. I’d met a prisoner, David Burnside. Previously a systems administrator in Umbrella. He had data that he wanted to give me, in exchange for a way off Rockfort. I reviewed it, then sent him on his way. Nothing of particular interest, you see. Except for one thing. A cryogenics patent credited to Alexia, filed by Umbrella USA shortly before her ‘death’. Is she in Antarctica, Alfred? I’d like a confirmation before wasting my time.”

Grayson couldn’t believe it, and for a moment he almost forgot about Wesker and the jagged metal inches from his throat. Ada hadn’t been lying. This wasn’t a confirmation, no; it could have simply been just that, a patent filed by Umbrella. But Grayson had never really believed in coincidences, not when things lined up so perfectly.

“How do I know you won’t simply kill him after I tell you?” Alfred said.

“You don’t. But that’s a risk you’ll have to take,” Albert said.

“She’s there,” Alfred said, finally. “In Antarctica. Your sources are correct.” He stepped closer, hands raised, palms turned out in a show of pacifism. “Now please,” he continued, “let him go, Albert.”

Grayson felt his heart stop, or perhaps slow to the point it felt as if it had stopped. _Alexia, are you really alive? Or is Alfred just telling Wesker this to save me?_

An alarm suddenly raised, sirens blaring. Albert pulled him back, away from the spike, and tossed him on his ass. “Seems my men activated the self-destruct sequence,” he remarked. Then he looked at Grayson. “There was something else in that data,” he said. “Project Darwin. No hard details, but your father’s name was attached to it, Grayson. I’ll have questions for you later, and for Alexia.” He paused, adding, “Assuming you get off Rockfort before it—” and he pantomimed an explosion “–all goes up in smoke.”

“How the fuck are you still alive?” Grayson asked. “They said you died in the Mansion Incident.”

“I did.” And then Albert smiled and was gone, sprinting away and over the wall. The wall was at least twenty feet high.

***

“Rodrigo, we’re back,” Claire said, climbing into the seaplane, an angry Steve trailing her heels.

Rodrigo was sitting in the co-pilot’s chair, a fresh bandage on his wound, and an open first-aid kit between his boots. Red lights whirled beyond the windshield, and an automated voice dully counted down the minutes to detonation. “Why’s the kid look so mad?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be happy, kid?” he asked Steve. “You’re getting out of here.”

Claire had spent the better part of an hour arguing with Steve about Alfred, and then the alarms had gone off, and they’d hauled ass back to the airport. “He wanted to kill Alfred,” she said. “But right now, this island’s about to blow the fuck up and take the honor from him.” She looked at Rodrigo. “Any idea who tripped the self-destruct sequence?”

“Same guys who want to erase any connection to this place, so Umbrella can’t find them,” Rodrigo said, wincing and hugging his side. “Shit, even with all this goddamn antiseptic and a clean bandage, it still hurts.”

“Probably infected,” Steve said, and climbed into the pilot’s seat, his thin, dirty fingers flipping switches and levers, and turning knobs. He quickly added, his eyes on the gauges, “The wound, I mean. Not suggestin’ you were bit or nothin’.”

“We’ll get you to the hospital as soon as we land,” Claire said, and smiled, patting Rodrigo’s knee. “Just need you to hang in there, Rodrigo.”

“About to take off,” Steve said, flipping a few more switches and levers.

The plane lurched forward with a roar and a shake, and then it was hurtling out of the hangar, on the open sea, and lifting, rising up into the clouds. “We’ll land in Lima. Closest city to here, accordin’ to the latitude and longitude of our location,” Steve said, checking a few of the gauges, his hands on the yoke. Clouds rolled past the windshield like wisps of cotton. “We’ll deal with Customs and whatever else we gotta when we get there.”

“I’ve never been to Peru,” Claire remarked, sitting on the floor, her back pressed against the cool metal of the hull.

“I got relatives there,” Rodrigo said. “In Surquillo. The ones who managed to leave San Amaro before Umbrella turned it into Rockfort.”

“Least there’s that,” Claire said, and closed her eyes with the intention of only resting them. She yawned, said, “It’ll be good to see your family,” and then slept.

When she woke, gray light filtered through the windshield, the world white and solid beyond the glass. Steve was no longer sitting at the controls, but on the floor opposite her. Rodrigo still sat in the co-pilot’s chair, slumped and motionless.

“He died while we were asleep,” Steve said, watching her. “The plane switched over to auto-pilot, and I was tired, so I slept. When I woke up about an hour ago, I looked at our position. We’re over the Antarctic.”

Claire started awake. “What?” she said in disbelief.

“He was still alive when the controls locked,” Steve said. “Apparently, he neglected to fuckin’ tell us the planes are locked into their flight-routes. So people don’t take off with Umbrella secrets in the cargo-bay.”

“Why didn’t he mention this?”

“Too focused on stayin’ alive, maybe?” Steve said. He looked at Rodrigo’s corpse, adding, “Not like it did him any good.” Standing up, Steve sighed and said, “Rodrigo said there’s people at this facility. We can still get help.” He jerked his chin toward a row of lockers. “Arctic gear in there, so at least we won’t freeze to death. Better get changed.”

“They’re Umbrella employees,” Claire said. “You think they’re gonna help us?”

Steve shrugged and strode over to the lockers, opening one with a squeak of old hinges. “We don’t really gotta choice now, do we?” he asked, dressing himself in layer after layer of thermal gear.

Claire glanced at Rodrigo and frowned, then walked over to another locker, layering the gear over her clothes. The gear was a bit big on her, but warm. “Guess not,” she conceded.


	24. The Rainbow After Rain

Alfred had served in the RAF before he’d joined Umbrella, and flew them in his personal jet to Antarctica. It said a lot about his life, Grayson decided, that flying in Alfred’s personal jet wasn’t something that he considered noteworthy or strange. Just another one of Alfred’s toys, he thought, like the tin Langensaltza soldiers Alfred had loved as a kid, or that fucking Panzer tank he’d bought on a whim and had parked outside the training facility, where it had sat collecting rust since 1994.

He sat in the co-pilot’s chair behind Alfred. The flight and G-suit Alfred had squeezed him into was tight in all the wrong places, and so was his helmet; but Grayson blamed that more or less on his size, and not Alfred’s inability to measure.

Below them, twenty-four hour sunlight glittered on the ice, and a sudden wave of nostalgia washed over him, of child-him staring through a porthole and waiting anxiously to land at the base in an Umbrella plane. Alfred brought the plane down, and said, over the mic built into their helmets, his voice crackling like a bad electrical signal, “Might be a bit bumpy.”

The plane landed on a strip of salted tarmac, turbulence shaking the cockpit and bouncing the plane on its wheels. He glimpsed escarpments of ice through a haze of snow, and a tundra that stretched out on all sides to nowhere.

The jet slowed as Alfred’s fingers flipped switches and pressed buttons, and then came to a stop, sliding into the darkness of a hangar. The hangar doors shuttered behind them, and Grayson knew the thermal systems would be kicking on right about now. Alfred undid his harness, then reached over and undid his. The windshield creaked up on pneumatic struts, the smell of concrete and fresh acrylic paint wafting from the hangar.

Grayson pulled off his helmet and smoothed down his sweaty hair, then climbed out of the plane after Alfred. “Alexia’s alive?” he asked. Why else, he thought, would Alfred bring them all the way to Antarctica? “Albert was serious?”

Alfred took off his own helmet and didn’t answer. He was looking at something. Grayson looked too, and saw other planes parked in the hangar—they were planes from Rockfort. “We best we be on our guard,” Alfred said, unzipping his flight and G-suit, and Grayson did the same. He double-backed to the jet and retrieved his unloaded bolt-action, and his ammo belt, from the cockpit.

Grayson noticed something in the window of one of the planes, a man. Rodrigo, but he wasn’t moving. “Captain Raval’s dead,” he said.

Alfred looked. “Good,” he said, holstering the rifle in its leather sling, then cinching the belt around his waist. “I never liked him.”

Before Grayson could reply, a gunshot cracked, and Alfred crumpled, blood pooling underneath him. There was a hole in his chest, and he was gasping for air, his breath coming out as a ragged, wet wheeze. He’d been shot in the lung; Grayson had heard that kind of breathing before, in Raccoon City.

Steve stepped out from the shadow of a plane, gun pointed. He wore a bulky parka, the Umbrella logo emblazoned on the breast-pocket, and a thick-knitted toque.

Grayson pulled his own gun, and said, the rage shaking his voice, “You made a big fucking mistake, kid.” He fingered the trigger. “Where’s Claire?”

“Don’t worry ‘bout it,” Steve said. “She’s safe.”

Alfred gasped, the air bubbling in his throat, blood pearling in the corners of his mouth and spilling over his chin as he tried and failed to take in air. The pool of blood grew steadily bigger. Grayson decided he’d worry about Steve later. Right now, Alfred was his priority. But as he went to pick Alfred up, Alfred was already dead.

Grayson suddenly felt very alone in the world, numb to his core.

“I did everyone a favor,” Steve said.

“Leave,” Grayson said, after a long silence.

Steve could have shot him, and he probably wanted to; but for some reason he didn’t. He put the gun away and left without another word. Grayson heard the echo of his footsteps receding, the faint thunk of a metallic door, and then all was silent.

Grayson lay down on the concrete beside Alfred’s corpse, suddenly very tired, and he slept.

He woke some time later, his cheek coming away from the concrete sticky with blood, hearing a sudden bang. Alfred’s corpse lay cold and stiff beside him.

Something wrapped around his ankle, eel-like and bristling with sharp spurs that tore into his flesh, and it yanked him across the hangar. He clawed at the concrete until his fingers bled, and Alfred’s corpse was a hundred yards away, and drifting farther away still. Then he was banging through a door, trawled down a hallway where the walls were papered in print-outs and Umbrella posters, past the HR offices, and then whipped around a corner, catching his arm on it, feeling the concrete scrape off a patch of epidermis.

He yelled for help. The thing around his ankle flung him up, then smashed him against the floor as if it meant to silence him. Twisting around, Grayson saw the thing: a long tentacle of some enormous prehistoric variant of sundew. Fumbling for his gun, he tried to point and shoot, but the thing whipped him against the wall and his shot missed. He’d banged his head, too, and felt dazed, the pain reverberating down his spine.

The rest of his journey into the depths of the Antarctica facility was a blur of concrete and expansion-grate, and the spongy cortex of an immense ant-hive upon which fat, winged ants flitted and scuttled. The thing around his ankle released him, and he skidded across a tiled floor and came to a stop. It was cold like a meat-locker. A honeycomb of CRT monitors glowed above him, each one displaying some sort of data-feed. Then the tentacle-thing slithered around his ankle again and plucked him off the floor, and he dangled in the air like a human mistletoe, the blood rushing to his head.

“I’m surprised the poison didn’t kill you,” a woman said, the accent distinctly English, of the high-brow and academic kind. “Were you the one who released the T-Virus here?”

He came face-to-face with Alexia, his eyes meeting the pale blue of hers. She was a woman now, her face a thing of sharp, aristocratic angles. Her nose was long and thin, her lips pink and soft. Hot tears stung his eyes, and all Grayson wanted was to hug her and never let go. But there was no recognition in Alexia’s eyes.

“Don’t you fucking recognize me?” he asked.

Behind her stood an open pod, like that unit she’d frozen the piglet in all those years ago, and it was cabled to stacks of old computers, a frayed ganglia of rubber cables and an oxygen mask dangling inside it. Alexia was naked, her breasts blue-veined, the nipples small and pale pink, skin glistening with a liquid that smelled of antiseptics and conjured in his mind images of hospitals. “No,” she said, finally. “Should I? Are you with the boy and girl?”

“Alexia, it’s me,” he pleaded. “Grayson Harman. Remember?”

Her expression was unreadable. “Prove it,” she said, finally.

“In my blazer, in the lining pocket, you’ll find your diary,” Grayson said, beginning to feel a little light-headed from the blood pooling in his skull. “In the right pocket of my pants,” he continued, “you’ll find the dragonfly barrette dad bought you, the one I’d picked out and gave you after your graduation ceremony. You kissed me on the cheek. You were ten, I was twelve.”

Alexia found both items, marveling. The tentacle released him, and he thudded on the floor, and it retreated through a crack in the tile. She leafed through her diary, her hair brown with wet and hanging about her face like lengths of twine, and paced back and forth, her bare feet slapping on the tile. Then Alexia looked at him, squatted on the toes of her feet, and kissed him with tongue, her slender fingers tangling in his hair. And he kissed her back, and didn’t stop.


	25. Catching Up

His lips started to burn. It started as a tingle, then gradually intensified, until it felt as ifhe was kissing hot cast-iron. He quickly peeled his lips from hers; his lips were raw and red, and he could feel a painful bubble forming on his tongue, as though he’d burned it on a slice of hot pizza.

“What the fuck?” he said, and licked at his sore, scalded lips.

“Sorry,” Alexia said. There was something in her eyes, a kind of fear. She touched him, her skin fever-hot.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and stood up. He touched her forehead; it was on fire. “You sick?” he asked, and checked again. Still hot. Grayson frowned. “Got some kinda fever?” Grayson stared at her, deflating, feeling a tight whorl of disappointment, of knowing, in his chest. “Lex...”

She stared at him, expressionless.

“Sorry,” he said, and pulled away. Grayson paced, glancing at the array of camera-feeds on the monitoring station. Clouds of snowtumbled past the cameras, washing out the horizon and the escarpments. Whiteout. “You need to put on some clothes,” he said, and mostly to distract himself from the numbness of his lips and his burned tongue, and from the fact Alfred was dead and Alexia wasn’t anymore, Grayson started to look around for clothes. Then his looking around became a frenzied, frustrated search as he shoved chairs out of the way, zip-tied bundles of cables, containers and filing cabinets full of print-outs and oak-tag folders, large metal canisters of what he presumed was liquid nitrogen. He caught his foot on a hose rigged to Alexia’s cryo-unit and tripped, landing hard on the tiled floor. He didn’t get back up. He didn’t want to get back up. Alfred was dead, and he wasn’t sure if Alexia was even human anymore.

 _Funny that a burned mouth freaks you out_ , he told himself. _Yet you were completely cool with the fucking tentacle,_ _asshole_. Maybe it had been easier to separate the tentacle from Alexia, Grayson decided. But her saliva, that was something he couldn’t separate from Alexia, because it was a tangible part of her, one he’d tasted for himself.

“Grayson.”

He rolled onto his back and stared at her. She’d found a lab coat somewhere, and it was too big for her. She looked concerned.

“I need to show you something,” he said, and he did.

Back in the hangar—Grayson still remembered his way around the facility—he showed her Alfred, who had turned the blue-pale of the several-hours dead, his body partially eaten; though Alexia had killed the zombie—one of the survivors from Rockfort, still dressed in its prison rags—who had been responsible for the mess. Alexia squatted beside his rigid, bloody ruin of a body, hugging herself in the over-sized lab coat. She looked as if she wanted to cry, but couldn’t remember how to.

Grayson wished he wasn’t so numb to seeing this sort of thing, but it had been a sight he’d witnessed a thousand times over in Raccoon City. And he’d been away from Alfred for so long that, though the sadness was definitely there and it hurt badly, it wasn’t as intense as it should have been. Still, he cried.

Alexia didn’t cry, though she appeared continuously on the brink of it. Maybe whatever had happened to her inside that tube had made it impossible for her to cry. Maybe her body had evolved to the point that it viewed sadness as a devolution, and so ithad discarded it in favor of some better, more productive evolutionary trait.

She took Alfred’s sapphire ring from what was left of his finger and dropped it into the pocket of her lab coat. Then she took off Alfred’s ammo belt and gashed her palm with the sharp corner of the buckle, trickling blood overhis corpse as though she was anointing itin some primitive funerary rite.

A moment later, Alfred burst into flames that bordered white in color, the stink of butane and sulfur in the air, and underneath that, of burnt hair and charred flesh.

Alexia stood up and stepped away from the makeshift pyre, dropping the belt. The wound on her hand knitted back together, the flesh smooth and white again. “We couldn’t bury him,” she said, finally. Then, to the crusted black thing that had once been Alfred, “I’m sorry you won’t rest in our family tomb, brother.”

“It’s the best we could do,” he said, wiping at his eyes and wondering why her flammable blood didn’t bother him as much as it should have. Grayson wasn’t usually one for words, but he wanted to say something, and so he did: “Alfred, you had a million and one problems, and we only solved one of them—our friendship. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. We could have solved the rest of your problems, because your sister’s here now, and she’s always been good atthat kind of thing. But it’s too late now…” He realized he was rambling and shook his head, turning away. “I’m sorry, Lex,” he said, meaning it.

“Was it the boy or the girl who shot him?”

He told her.

“He’s still here,” she said. “So is the girl.”

“The girl didn’t do anything,” Grayson said. “It was Burnside. Redfield had nothing to do with Alfred’s death.”

“But the boy cares about Redfield,” Alexia said, her expression unreadable as always; but he knew what she was intimating. “I’m going to have fun with these little rats, Grayson,” she said, conversationally. “Like the dragonfly and the ants.”

“Do whatever you want to Burnside, Lex, but Redfield’s innocent.”

Alexia was already walking away.

The Antarctica facility was built like one of Alexia’s ant-colonies with its zigzagging, meandering tunnels. They rode a lift down, and as it came to a stop and the doors slid open, the familiardiorama of the mansion greeted them,its stoic Palladian facade beyond a yard of hydroponic grass banked on all sides by walls painted uncannily to resemble a lazy summerscape.

Grayson crossed the yard behind Alexia, past flowerbeds his father had planted years ago, but had since been tended to by the yard’s hydroponics systems. Automatically, he jogged ahead of Alexia and grabbed one of the double-doors and opened it for her with a squeak of old, infrequently oiled hingesjustas he’d done when they were kids, because he liked to do that for Alexia, and because his father had hammered into his head (“Always get the door for a lady, Grayson,” his father had said. “You weren’t raised in a barn”) that men were supposed to do things like that. She flashed him a smile, and he smiled back, following her inside.

The scent of dead flowers, from vases his father had placed around the mansion all those years ago, permeated the foyer, mingling oddly with the scent of Cuban cigars, the ones Alexander had liked to smoke, and of sweet Oriental tobacco from Edward Ashford’s pipe habit. It smelled, Grayson decided, exactly as he remembered it. Like home. Real home.

The foyer was large. The floor was of imported marble, the walls wainscoted in dark cherry-wood.The room, likethe rest of the mansion,wasfurnished with antiques the Ashfords had brought from their ancestral home in England. Suits of 15th-Century English armor stood against the walls, halberds in their hands, glittering in the light of the enormous Venetian crystal chandelier that hung from the domed ceiling like an iced upside-down layer cake. Painted on the ceiling was a Baroque-styled quadratura that depictedthe story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which, his father had once told him, had beenEdward Ashford’s favorite Greek myth. Edward had commissioned it, his father had said, when his wife had died of cancer in the 1950s. Grayson had always liked it; he remembered sitting on the staircase as a kid, staring up at the fresco and trying to identify all the little, subtle details in it.

They walked upstairs to the balustrade, then through a door and down the hallway. They passed the door to Alexander’s study (it had been Edward’s beforehand), Alexander’s laboratory (still shuttered tight, Grayson had found after he’d tried the lock, even all these years later), Alexander’s bedroom, the drawing room, the library, Alexia’s old study… If walking down Memory Lane was a thing, then this, he thought, was walking down Memory Avenue. All of his childhood memories came flooding back to him, and Grayson found himself smilingat familiar dents and scuffs on the walls from their frequent rough-housing, at the row of height-charts his father had marked off in old strips of masking tape at the end of the hallway beside his bedroom door, their names and dates written in his father’s precise, old-fashioned handwriting. When he saw Alfred’s name, however, his gaze lingered, and the smile slowly slipped from his face.

Alexia touched his hand, the tenderness surprising him. “Come on,” she said.

Grayson nodded and let her take his hand, and they walked like that, hand-in-hand, to her childhood bedroom.

Her real bedroom looked exactly like her fake bedroom on Rockfort, but more lived-in. He could still smell the traces of flowery perfume in the air, from when Alexia had accidentally knocked over a bottle and it had soaked into the antique Oriental carpet (his father, Grayson recalled, had been absolutely furious about it, but had never raised his voice, had just sternly reprimanded Alexia, and she’d never spilled another bottle again).The walls were red-papered, on it printed tessellations of gold fleur-de-lis. Porcelain dolls gazed emptily at them from their showcases, somehow eerier than the reproductions in the Rockfort mansion.

Alexia removed the lab coat, standing naked, her back toward him. For someone as tall and willowy as her, her backside was round and shapely rather than rectangular and flat, with a small beauty mark on the right cheek. Grayson grinned at the observation, but said nothing, turning around and picking through her ancient vinyl collection, which was exactly as they’d left it.

He saw a couple of Journey albums, and snorted. “Journey, Lex?” he said. “Seriously?”

And just like that, the air of some untouchable mutant goddess fell away, and Lex was the awkward, clumsy girl he remembered. She flushed. “Am I not allowed to have my guilty bloody pleasures?” she asked, dressing in some sort of antique-looking gown that might have been purple or black.

“I bet you had a Steve Perry poster in your room somewhere,” he remarked, amused. “Anyway, I like Air Supply.” He paused. _Annette_. Putting the album back on the shelf, Grayson pulled another at random. Eurythmics. He pulled another. One of Kate Bush’s earlier albums. “Never took you for a Kate Bush woman,” he remarked. “She made a new album right after you—well, I’ll let you check it out when you can. Lot of stuff you’ve missed.”

“I listen to everything,” she remarked, combing her hair in the vanity mirror. She looked over her shoulder at him and smirked. Now it was Alexia’s turn to snort. “Air Supply, Grayson?” she said. “Really? Didn’t they do that one oppressively saccharine song, Sweet Dreams?”

“The best ballad ever,” he said, chuckling and putting her album back where he’d found it. “You look good,” Grayson said, without thinking, giving her a once-over. He leaned against her vinyl showcase and crossed his arms. “Really good,” he added. “You should consider modeling, Lex. Get outta this Umbrella shit.”

“You never had a problem with my ‘Umbrella shit’ before,” she said, turning in her seat to look at him, draping one long, pale leg over the other. Alexia seemed to read something in his face, and said, “Something big happened, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Raccoon City’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Blown up,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Government dropped a couple missiles on it. Wiped it off the map. Now Umbrella’s tangled up in the Raccoon Trials. It’s all over the news; it’s like fucking Nuremberg in the Supreme Court.”

Alexia stared, silent. But he could see the disbelief in her eyes.

“I dunno what you and Umbrella are planning,” he said. “Because I know you didn’t fund this cryo-shit yourself. My dad was your legal guardian after Alexander vanished, right? He was in charge of your finances. Dad would’ve never let you have that kinda money to do something so reckless with.” He stared at her, then asked, after a long pause, “What are you and Spencer planning?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Grayson,” Alexia said.

“Bullshit.”

Alexia shrugged.

“You’re gonna have a lot of shit hitting the fan when we get outta here,” he told her. “Guarantee you’re gonna get called into the courts, and then there’s the whole situation of faking your death you’ll need to sort out with the feds. You’re a dual-citizen Lex. You’re gonna have a lot of paperwork to do and phone-calls to make, both in the States and in England. And then there’s Alfr—arrangements to see to.”

“I’ll worry when I need to,” she said smoothly, and stood up, meeting his gaze. Her eyes were so pale they were almost white. She trailed her finger along the thick line of his eyebrow, smiling. “We’ve been apart for fifteen years, Grayson, and all you can talk about is Spencer and the bloody courts. Then again, I suppose that’s like you, always worrying about me.”

“Lex, Spencer’s gonna make you his patsy,” he said. “You’ll wind up serving time in a fucking max-security prison while that fucking paraplegic mummy and his pets on the Board get off, scot-free. With _your_ company.” He frowned. “I may not like Umbrella, but I rather it winds up in your hands than in Spencer’s arthritic claws.”

“You’re doing it again,” Alexia said, pressing her finger against his lips. The pad of her finger was warm, as if there was a tiny fire crackling under the skin. “Worrying about me. I’m a big girl now, Grayson,” and she gave him a coy smile. “I can handle Spencer. All right?”

He nodded.

“You forget that I’m very good at seeing the long-term,” she said. “That’s why I waited for you. Why I told Alfred to entrust—”

“What?”

Alexia pulled back slightly, surprised. “I wasn’t sure if the cryostasis tank would function properly,” she said. “I needed someone there to ensure that, should things go sideways, to manually override the tank’s automatic processes so I didn’t die.” Her mouth became a thin, pink line. “He didn’t tell you,” she said, barely containing the contempt in her voice. “I shouldn’t even be surprised.”

“You wanted me there? To override the controls?”

“If something had gone wrong, yes. Alfred wasn’t reliable,” she said. “You’ve been nothing _but_ reliable, Grayson. For our entire life, you were always the one I could fall back on. Yes, I wanted you there. I wanted you to be my contingency plan.”

“I thought you were dead for fifteen years,” he said, barely loud enough to hear himself.

Now Alexia barely hid her anger, and said, “He didn’t even have the courtesy to tell you that I was alive?”

“I think he forgot,” Grayson said, and paused. _Forgot until he didn’t,_ _anyway_. He sat on the edge of her bed, the coil-springs creaking, suddenly feeling very tired again. The duvet smelled musty from infrequent airing.

“You need rest,” she said, and strode over to him, gently coaxing him down onto the mattress. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Other than the couple winks I caught in the hangar? I’m not sure.”

Alexia pursed her lips, then sat on the bed beside him. “Sleep, Grayson,” she told him, and suddenly he remembered a very specific moment in which Alexia, aged six, had told eight-year-old him to sleep with that same stern look on her face, because he’d been feeling unwell and insisting that he didn’t need any rest. “We can speak more later,” she continued, and laid on her side next to him, raising herself on her elbow and propping her head in her hand. “The undead, as far as I know, can’t use elevators. We’ll be safe here.”

For some reason that reminded him of Wesker, and he said, “Albert was looking for you, back on Rockfort.”

“Albert Wesker?”

“Yes.”

Alexia looked thoughtful, and said, “Interesting.”


	26. Here Comes the Cavalry

They’d finally managed to charter a boat after a morning of back-and-forths in broken Spanish, and then the better part of an afternoon with a German expat who had offered to translate for them and help them with paperwork—all for a fee that was well beyond reasonable, but still a fee they had paid after failing to haggle him down. Now they were coming up on the island, a black lump on the horizon, aboard a fisherman’s dingy that had been brand-new sixty years ago.

The locals had called it Isla de San Amaro, but the German had told them it was Rockfort nowadays, owned and operated by the Umbrella Corporation. The German had warned them not to approach it; the local government had pretty much given Umbrella free reign over the island, he’d said, and Umbrella’s people shot to kill. But nobody shot at them. Jill noticed plumes of dark smoke rising from the island. Something bad had happened.

“Looks like there was some kinda fire,” Jill said to Chris, who was busy tooling up for the mission while their captain, as he’d done since they’d left port, ignored them, because he didn’t speak a lick of English. Chris handed her a pack. She took it, slinging it over her shoulder. “You sure the e-mail’s even from Claire? This is probably a trap, Chris.” Jill frowned. “We know too much.”

“Trap or not, it’s still a chance to fuck Umbrella,” he said, finishing with his pack and shouldering it. Like her, Chris wore his old S.T.A.R.S fatigues. “Besides,” Chris said, “I’m not sure why, but I gotta gut-feeling it’s not bullshit, Jill. Claire disappeared after looking into that shit in Paris.” He sighed. “I should’ve never told her I was in Europe. It’s my fault she’s here.”

An eyewitness had reported they’d seen a woman of Claire’s description being escorted out of the Umbrella building in La Défense by a security detail, then put into an unmarked vehicle. Feeling something was wrong, the eyewitness had reported the incident to the Police Nationale, but nothing, as far as Jill or Chris knew, had come of it. “It’s a shame Carlos couldn’t come,” she said. “He would’ve been useful. He was UBCS. Mentioned that he’d trained here.”

Chris looked at her, frowning. “Too bad he’s in Argentina, huh?”

She snorted. “Are you seriously jealous?”

“Not at all.”

Jill smirked. “Sure, partner. Anyway, it wasn’t like that. We helped each other out. That’s all.”

Chris ignored her, and said, “There’s a trail leads from the beach up the side of the cliffs and through the jungle. Should take us to the facility.”

She raised her eyebrows. “How’d you get the layout?”

“While I was investigating in Europe,” he said, heading onto the deck and stepping over spools of oily rope and heaps of netting. Their captain didn’t bother helping them with the gig, but Jill had some experience with boats because her father had operated a sailing tour in California, where he’d met her mother, and where Jill had later worked in the summers as a teenager. “Another reason I’m confident Claire’s here,” Chris said, lowering himself into the gig. “This place? Umbrella sends people here to permanently shut them up.”

Jill climbed in after him, unhooked the gig from the dinghy, and yanked the cord on the motor. The gig roared to life, scudding across the water, spraying seawater in their face. “Carlos didn’t mention that part,” she remarked.

“Probably ‘cause he didn’t want you thinking badly of him,” Chris said, sitting on the bench opposite her.

Jill shrugged. “Maybe.”

They tethered the boat to an old dock, then climbed out and started up the trail. The stench of something rotten was on the air, underneath the pervasive, acrid stink of smoke, and gradually gave way to the smell of steamed vegetables as the jungle closed around them, trapping them in a permanent inversion layer of heat. Sweat was already rolling off her as they walked along the path, Chris cutting away the trees and overgrowth with a machete ahead of her.

“According to the file I read on this place, this trail was used by local drug-traffickers before Umbrella bought the island,” Chris explained, hacking away bushes and branches. “For a brief time, Umbrella was using it to transport BOWs to the docks back there, but abandoned it when they built the airport. Been abandoned since. Should take us to the training facility.”

“How deep did you manage to dig?” Jill asked.

“Deep enough that some of Umbrella’s competitors caught wind and tried to buy me off,” Chris said. “Told them to go fuck themselves, of course. They weren’t happy about that.”

Gradually, the jungle thinned out, became more manicured. They found themselves in front of a large concrete wall topped with spools of razor-wire. Several NO TRESPASSING and PRIVATE PROPERTY signs were plastered pointlessly on the wall. Chris dropped his pack onto the ground and fished out a couple of blocks of C-4, which he attached to the wall. Then he unspooled the detonator cable.

“No fucking around, huh?” Jill said, amused.

Chris flashed a grin and picked up his pack. “Not where my sister’s concerned.”

Once they were a safe distance away, Chris detonated the explosive, and the wall crumbled like a wet cookie. Jill could make out some sort of courtyard beyond the wall, and the dark, squat shape of a tank. They stepped through the wall. Jill looked right, then left. Metal drums on the right, stacked on a rotting pallet, and on the left stood a chain-link gate. Other than those things, she saw nothing. “I don’t like this,” she said, pulling her gun.

Something shot out from underneath the tank and lunged at them, but missed. A mangy German Shepherd, open wounds glittering reddish-black on its skin, its eyes like peeled hard-boiled eggs. It gnashed its teeth and lunged again, this time at Jill, but she side-stepped, pivoted, and shot it. The dog crumpled with a high-pitched whine, lying on its side in a steadily growing pool of viscous blood, its hind-legs twitching.

“There’s been an outbreak,” Chris said. “Shit.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Jill said, holstering her gun and pulling the bill of her S.T.A.R.S cap down low over her eyes. “Fuck, this shit just follows us everywhere.”

“Claire...”

“She’s okay,” Jill said, touching his arm. “She’s your sister, Chris. Got through Raccoon City, like me. She’s a survivor.”

Chris nodded. “Thanks, Jill.” He looked at her. “For coming with me.”

“We said we’d stop Umbrella,” Jill said. “Here’s as good a place to start as any.” She smiled, showing a sliver of teeth. “Besides,” she continued, “you’re my partner, Chris. Have been since Arklay. I wouldn’t let you do this on your own.”

The chain-link gate was padlocked and chained, but two shots from Chris’s gun got it open. He yanked the busted padlock off, tossed it aside, and then squeaked through the gate, mud squelching under his boots. A few dead zombies were scattered around the yard, though none of them had been shot; their necks had been broken. Some of them were still twitching, too, which meant they hadn’t died that long ago.

“Snapped their necks clean,” Chris said, inspecting one of the corpses. It was dressed in tactical gear, but didn’t possess anything—no badges, no patches, no emblems of any kind—that identified it as having belonged to Umbrella’s paramilitary forces. H.C.F was stamped on the back of its vest, in faded white stencil. “H.C.F,” Chris said, and looked at her. “Ring any bells?”

Jill shook her head. “Mercenaries, maybe? Probably sent by one of Umbrella’s competitors.”

“Could be,” Chris said. “In any case, whoever killed them probably isn’t far from here. Better keep our eyes peeled.”


	27. A Moment of Relief

He’d slept for what had felt like an eternity, dreamless and deep. He woke to the soft incandescent glow of the Victorian lamp in the corner of Alexia’s bedroom, atop a spindly antique end-table with curved legs. Alexia wasn’t in the room. He wondered if he’d dreamed it all, and he was still on Rockfort, in Alexia’s doppelganger bedroom, waking from another drunken stupor.

The door creaked open. Alexia stepped inside, carrying a tray with a tureen of something, a bottle of scotch, and two glasses. She closed the door with her foot, then set the food down on a chair.

“It’s just some soup I’d heated up,” she told him. “The scotch, however, is vintage. 1971, to be precise.” Alexia chuckled. “Fitting, isn’t it? A bottle of whiskey that’s been in storage since my brother and—well.” She gently cleared her throat. The dress she wore looked old, like something some turn-of-the-century debutante would have worn to the theater, cut from lacy dark fabric. Her ruby glittered on her neck, on a strap of black Italian leather.

“You and the scotch got a lot in common,” he said, sitting up and grinning. “Born at the same time, sat in storage for some years, but even so, gets better with age.”

She snorted. “Listen to that, a bloody poet.”

“Maybe.” He got up and strode over to the tureen; it was still hot. He used the hand-towel she’d brought to remove the lid. Canned chicken noodle soup. “I’m surprised you even managed to heat up the soup, Lex,” he teased. “You’re a shitty cook.”

“The directions are on the bloody can, Grayson. I’m not mentally-challenged.” She sighed, looked at him and smirked. “But you’re absolutely right. I’m horrible at cooking. That’s why I have you, my dear.”

“That dress,” he said, picking up a spoon and helping himself to the soup, “looks nice on you. Where’d you get it?”

“It was my grandmother’s.” She paused, gave him a once-over, and then joined him for the meal. Fifteen years in cryostasis had left her a very hungry woman, and she dug into their meal as if it would evaporate at any moment. “Well, the woman who was married to Edward.” Alexia frowned, spooned more of the soup into her mouth. “You’d read my diary,” she added. “You know about Code: Veronica, I assume.”

“You’re an Ashford,” Grayson assured her, uncorking the scotch and pouring two fingers into each of the crystal glasses she’d brought. “Your dad had to use some family DNA or something, because you look like an Ashford. You have the same long, thin nose as the Ashfords in all those portraits. Same blue eyes. Same jawline and cheekbones.” Grayson sipped his scotch, and it was probably the best scotch he’d ever drunk; it evaporated in his mouth, leaving behind a smooth, smoky flavor. “Only difference is you’re not a redhead like most of them,” he added, and drank. “Like Stanley, Thomas, Arthur, your grandfather when he was younger—I’ve seen pictures—and Alexander. But make no mistake, Lex, when people see your face they know you’re an Ashford.”

“My ‘long, thin’ nose,” she said, and laughed. “Should I be insulted?”

“I like your nose,” he said.

She moved closer to him and smirked, nursing her scotch with the cautious air of someone who didn’t drink very much, or wasn’t even sure that they even liked to. “It’s just my nose you like, is it?” she said, and she set her scotch down and started to undress. “There isn’t anything else you like about my body, Grayson?”

Grayson grinned.“When did you get this goddamn smooth?”

“Paying attention to you and taking notes,” she teased, and kissed him. “And,” she said, between kisses, “I had fifteen years to think about it.”

Within seconds, they were both naked and on the bed, Alexia straddling his hips, raking her nails down his pectorals and peppering his neck with branding-iron kisses. Her skin was soft and fever-hot, the muscles underneath it taunt and lean.

They came together with a mutual grunt, and she rode him sinuously and slickly, her hips rolling in storm-blown waves. Gradually, her slickness became something uncomfortable, almost painful, like the rash of a stinging nettle. But then that pain transmogrified into a weird sort of sadistic pleasure, and he found himself rocking desperately between her pale, wet thighs, pushing her down onto the mattress and pinning her there, muscles rippling with the effort of sex.

And then their climaxes shook them suddenly and violently, and Grayson kissed the sweep of her neck, down to her pink-nippled breasts, their bodies trembling, hard, as the last volts of pleasure circuited their nerves and fizzled out. She moaned underneath him, fingernails clawing his back, leaving in their wake ten painful welts, like cat-scratches that hadn’t quite broken the skin.

Alexia kissed him, hungrily and deeply, and wound her arms around him, pinning him against her damp body with a strength that belied her willowy form. Then she grinned, smug and triumphant, and said, “When I initially imagined this scenario, it involved a fireplace, wine, and music. Too many movies, I suppose.”She giggled and squeezed his ass, adding, “Someone’s been diligent with their squats.”

“Couldn’t seduce you with a flabby ass,” he teased, and rolled off the cradle of her hips, lying beside her on the musty, sex-smelling duvet.His lips burned from her saliva, and so did his crotch, as if he’d rubbed poison ivy on it. Uncomfortable, but the pain slowly subsided, and when Grayson looked down to assess his flaccid parts, theyseemed fine, if a little red and itchy.

He stretched like a lazycat. Raccoon City, Jill, Annette, Sherry, Claire, Steve, Rockfort, Alfred’s death, Antarctica, Wesker—all of it felt like the events of someone else’s life, pieces of another Grayson Harman. “You look mildly uncomfortable,” Alexia remarked.

“Whatever cryo did to you,” he said, wincing, “it’s kinda painful.”

“It won’t last long,” she assured him. “Chemicals in my blood, in my… well, you know.” Alexia frowned. “I’ll fix it eventually. I promise.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead, then his lips, and left his skin tingling in both places. “The last thing I want is sex to hurt you, Grayson.” She smiled, smoothed back his hair. “I want you to enjoy it as much as I do.”

“Maybe I’m a sadist, because I kinda liked it,” he admitted. “Or maybe I just got bored of regular sex.” Grayson paused. “But keep the tentacles away from me.”

Her smile immediately collapsed. “I don’t want to hear about other women,” she told him, scowling. Then she laughed at his tentacle joke, as she’d laughed at all his jokes when they were kids, and said, “Nothing will go near your bum, Grayson.”

He still maintained several misgivings about Alexia’s condition, but it was something he’d have to learn to live with, Grayson knew. Whatever had happened to her in cryostasis, it had changed her on a cellular level, turned her alien, and he still wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the surface, she was the same Alexia he remembered, just older. But in her DNA, in every cell and nerve-cluster, Alexia had become something else. It made him think of that movie Species, of the nympho alien shape-shifter.

“We have some time,” she said, looking at him. “Redfield and Burnside aren’t going anywhere. The nearest ‘civilization’, if you can even call it that, is that Australian observation base a few miles from here. So why not tell me a bit about the world these days? Technology moves quickly.”

Grayson told her, and she listened with rapt attention. He told her about e-mail, the internet, home video game consoles that actually didn’t suck (“Nothin’ like that Odyssey shit we had as kids, or Calecovision or Atari”), computers that could display more than a couple of crude pixel pictures and text (“3-D is pretty new,” he said. “Games look amazing these days. There’s this one I used to play a lot in Raccoon City called Doom. You’d probably like it. And Mario, that little plumber guy from Donkey Kong? He’s got his own games now”)… Alexia nodded her head as he spoke, occasionally stopping him to ask questions (“Wait, darling, back up.Michael Jackson looks like what now? You can’t be serious”).

Then things deviated from the topic of pop-culture and technology, and he started talking about his time in Raccoon City, about Sherry and Clancy. Alexia only vaguely remembered Clancy, or at least pretended that she only vaguely remembered Clancy, and then she was prodding him about Sherry. He didn’t tell her about Jill or Annette, at least not yet.

“So Birkin had a daughter,” she said, incredulously. “I didn’t think he’d ever reproduce. Annette has strange tastes.”

He frowned. Grayson didn’t want to talk about Annette right now; it still hurt, felt raw and painful like an open sore. “Alexia,” he said, “what do you know about Project Darwin?”

She stared at him, shook her head. “Not much,” she said, and he could hear the honesty in her voice. “Only what you’d read in my diary, Grayson.” Alexia stood up and, naked, strode over to a full-length mirror gilded in scrolled French gold-leaf, absently studying her reflection. “Scott hid his research,” she continued, without looking at him, the delicate lines of her scapulae tensing. “Initially, I thought it was because he didn’t want us to find it. But I think it was Spencer he was hiding it from.”

“Alfred didn’t trust Spencer either,” Grayson said. “He said he’d killed your grandfather.”

“There’s no definitive proof, but there were certainly rumors.” Alexia turned to him, folding her arms across her breasts. “Even as a girl, I knew Spencer wasn’t being forthright with the Ashfords. I understood that Umbrella was mine, but reasoned that it was because of my age that they didn’t put me in charge, and that it would change in the future.” Her lips became a thin, hard line. “But I was certainly old enough to head a family, it seems.” She sighed. “Anyway,” she continued, “I’m relatively certain Spencer had no intention of ever giving the company over to me. Those rumors of how he’d sabotaged my grandfather and exposed him to the Progenitor virus? I don’t doubt that there’s some truth to it.”

“He put Alfred on Rockfort to keep him outta the company’s business,” Grayson said, and paused. “Just a theory, I mean.”

“And a sound one,” she said, looking at him. “Make no mistake, I will get Umbrella back from Spencer.” Alexia walked over to him, and he automatically grabbed her hips and pressed his forehead against her navel. She combed her fingers through his hair and said, “I’m sorry I don’t know much about Project Darwin. If I could provide answers, I would. But the truth of the matter is simply that I was too young, Grayson, and adults don’t tell children anything.”

He looked up at her and nodded, letting go. “I wish I could ask dad,” he said.

“How is Scott?”

Grayson frowned, unsure if he should tell her. But, after mulling it over for a few moments, he knew that there was no hiding anything from Alexia, and so he told her. “Dad’s dying,” he said, bluntly. “Heart cancer. He’s laid up in a hospital in New York, and he’s been through three rounds of chemo. That’s all I know.”

Alexia said nothing. She seemed to be absorbed in thought.

“Sorry, Lex.”

She nodded. “I’ll worry about Scott,” she assured him. Then, “We’ve dawdled enough. Redfield and Burnside are trying to escape.” Alexia paused, as if listening for something, and said, “They found a snow-truck.”


	28. The Best Laid Plans...

“Check it out,” Claire said, grinning.

A row of yellow snow-trucks were parked in the vehicle hangar, next to a stack of rock-salt, and a pallet-jack. One of the bags had ripped at some point, a scree of white crystals scattered on the pavement. There were smaller vehicles, too: a forklift, cherry-picker, maintenance carts with emergency lights bolted to them.

“My mom worked in a warehouse,” Steve said, conversationally. “Reminds me of that. When I was little, sometimes she had to take me to work. I remember bein’ really bored in the break-room.”

“You okay?” Claire asked. “You’ve been acting weird since you went back to the hangar for Rodrigo’s gun.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, pushing his hands into the pockets of his parka. “Couldn’t reach it. Too many zombies.”

Claire knew something had gone down, but Steve kept denying that anything had. Still, she wouldn’t push it; he’d been through enough, and Claire didn’t want to make him feel any worse. After Chris had returned from his mission in the Arklays, he’d acted pretty weird too, and so Claire had given him space, had stopped calling him for a while. Eventually, her brother had called her back and said everything was okay. And Steve would too, when he was ready.

“Wonder if the keys are in one of them?” Steve said, making his way down the expansion-grate stairs. He strode across the concrete to one of the snow-trucks, jumping onto its thick rubber tread and peering through the dark driver-side window. He shook his head. “Don’t see nothin’ in the ignition.” He turned around and hopped down. “Mom’s warehouse had snow-trucks, too, ‘cause winter could get pretty bad where we’d lived. Minnesota, you know? They kept the keys in the office, usually. I remember my mom havin’ to sign ‘em out.”

“Then I guess we should check the office,” Claire said, looking around for some kind of door that indicated an office. She saw a gray fire-door not far from them, beneath a flickering fluorescent strip. OFFICE was spelled out on the door in adhesive letters. “Well,” she said, “that wasn’t hard to find.”

She opened the door and stepped inside. The office was cramped, with gray walls and a concrete floor. There was a small break-area to her right: two worn couches, two vending machines, one of which had an OUT OF ORDER signed taped to it, and a mini-fridge that stank heavily of old food. On her left was an aluminum desk, a whiteboard behind it with shift-rotations written in erasable marker.Several posters and leaflets, most of which advertised Umbrella’s health-benefits and certification programs, covered the walls like some kind of corporate fungus.

A laminate sign-out sheet tacked to a clipboard sat on the corner of the desk, listing several signatures and handwritten timestamps. There was a sticky note, too, on the clipboard:

 _Donald, I_ _need those fucking keys back_ _. It’s all we got! Our asshole boss cut us down to one keyring after that shit Mason pulled, when he’d tried driving off in one of the trucks. Speaking of which, have you seen him? Hasn’t reported to his last three shifts._ _Also, fuck Alfred._ _He denied my vacation._

_-Frank_

“Claire,” Steve said, and beckoned her over. “There’s blood on the door-knob here.”

She hadn’t noticed the door at the back of the room until he’d pointed it out; she’d been busy looking around the desk. “It’s pretty fresh,” she said, and opened the door.

Another office, probably for the Manager. An aluminum desk, replete with computer and neglected paperwork, stood against the back wall, a map of Antarctica tacked up behind it that showed the facility’s location. They were a couple of miles south of the Weddell Sea, in Western Antarctica. In the chair behind the desk sat a dead man in blue coveralls, who stirred when she drifted too close. Claire shot him in the head, blood splashing the Antarctica map, and the body slumped with a death-rattle and did not move again. Donald Wentz stared vacantly at them from the laminate ID badge around the zombie’s neck.

“Probably tried Mason’s plan,” Steve said, digging irreverently through the pockets on Donald’s bloody, tattered coveralls. “Didn’t work out. Here we go.” He fished out the keyring, each key identical to the others. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Displayed on the computer screen was a half-finished e-mail begging for help from Umbrella Headquarters. The keys on the keyboard were smeared with blood. “Poor guy,” Claire said, and shook her head. “Umbrella needs to pay for this shit. I can’t wait to get that data to Jill, and—oh shit.” Claire stopped, buried her face in her hands. She’d been so focused on getting off Rockfort that she’d forgotten about the e-mail to Leon, the one with the coordinates for Rockfort. “The e-mail,” she said, and looked at Steve. “I forgot. My brother, he has no idea we’re here.”

“Maybe we can send another e-mail?” Steve hazarded. “It’s still logged in.” He gestured at the computer, at Donald Wentz’s corpse. “If you’re so damn sure your brother’s gonna go to Rockfort, maybe he’ll be smart enough to check a computer?”

“It can’t hurt,” Claire said. She thought about erasing Wentz’s e-mail, but it felt like desecration, like writing over the words on a tombstone with graffiti. So she saved the draft, then opened a fresh e-mail. Thankfully, there were was some correspondence between Frank Duval and Alfred’s former secretary, the one she’d taken the ID from, about a vacation request that had been denied. She copied the address, glanced at the coordinates of the facility on the map, and then typed out a quick e-mail:

_Chris,_

_This is Claire. If you’re seeing this, we’re in Antarctica. I’ll explain later. I’ve enclosed the coordinates: 84°29'16.9" S 64°47'36.9" W. Please help._

_-Claire_

She sent it and hoped for the best.

“We goin’?” Steve asked.

“Where are we gonna go, Steve? We’re in Antarctica.”

“We can’t bank on your brother seein’ that e-mail, Claire,” Steve argued, pocketing the keys. “We gotta try gettin’ out ourselves. If we do, we’ll contact him again.” He paused, looked at the map behind the desk. Steve walked over, pointed at another point on the map, about seven miles north of their position. “There’s an Australian research base,” he said. “We could make it in one of the snow-trucks, easy.”

“What if my—”

“The chances of your brother showin’ up in Antarctica is slim to none, Claire,” Steve said, scowling. “We gotta make for that base, or we’re gonna die.”

She sighed. Claire knew Steve was right; it was a long-shot that her brother would ever see that e-mail. Another opportunity might not come to leave this place, so she nodded, followed him into the vehicle hangar and to one of the snow-trucks. Its plow was still crusted with salt. “I’ll drive,” she said, and took the keys from him. “My best friend’s boyfriend does snow-plowing in the winters, and he took me and her along a couple of times. I can run it. Prefer motorcycles, though.” She climbed up, opened the driver-side door, then sat behind the wheel. The cabin smelled of cigarettes and motor oil, and of old, stale coffee, and, inexplicably, of rot—ingrained forever in the cheap polyester upholstery.

“You ride bikes?” Steve said, climbing into the passenger’s seat.

“Gotta Harley,” she said, and nodded, turning the keys in the ignition and letting the truck warm up. “Once spring hits, I’m goin’ riding again. Maybe do some interstating.”

“Sounds awesome,” Steve said, and paused. “I… never got my driver’s license. Never got the chance.”

“You’re only seventeen, right? You got time,” Claire said, and climbed out of the snow-truck to cross the concrete and hit the button that opened the hangar shutters. Then she came back, put the truck into drive, and eased out.

The world was whitewashed beyond the hangars, and for a moment, Claire wondered if it was a good idea to go out during a whiteout like this. Something told her that no, it wasn’t a good idea; but she didn’t want to stay here any longer than she needed to. Thankfully, the truck had a radio and a map, with the route marked off in red pen. Steve had been right; Donald Wentz had attempted to escape.

Something moved in the backseat. Ten clammy fingers gripped her shoulders like pincers, and the zombie’s rank, warm breath rolled over her neck, rotted teeth dipping toward her carotid. Steve shot it, and the dead man toppled backward with a groan, blood splashing the torn fabric of the roof.

Claire, heart thumping in her chest, stopped the truck, and they got out and pulled the body from the backseat. One of the Rockfort prisoners that had arrived on one of the other planes; though Steve didn’t recognize them. They dumped the body, then got back inside the warm truck and drove away, the thick rubber treads kicking up snow, crawling through the drifts.

“Close,” Claire said. “Thanks, Steve.”

“Don’t mention it. You woulda done the same for me.” He was reading the map and fiddling with the radio. “Tryin’ to figure out what frequency the Australian base is on, so they know to look for us in case we get lost in this fuckin’ whiteout—” Steve suddenly stopped talking, catching something in the passenger-side window. “What the fuck is that?”

Before Claire could look, whatever Steve had seen had caught up with them. It shook the truck, then lifted if off the ground like a toy, treads still spinning and the walls giving way with a squeal of metal as if crushed by some enormous fist, Steve and her bouncing around the cabin like beads in a child’s rattle. The truck rolled once, then twice, and her head slammed against the windshield and cracked it, and that was all Claire remembered.


	29. The Fast Stranger

Jill stared at the prisoner number stamped on the zombie’s clothes, shaking her head. “Fucking prisoners,” she said to Chris. “Umbrella was keeping fucking prisoners here.”

“You sound about as surprised as me,” Chris said dryly.

“Not surprised in the slightest,” she agreed, holstering her gun and stepping over the corpse.

They made their way down a drab hallway, past empty offices, and a row of payphones that no longer worked. A poster of a USS soldier was taped to the wall, advertising dates for the next round of try-outs, and beside it was a print-out listing materialsthat the would-be recruit would need to bring: a signed physical examination, a completed application, hazard handling and retrieval certifications, four different shots and the paperwork to prove they’d gotten them, and their company ID. It reminded Jill of the S.T.A.R.S tests, made her feel weirdly nostalgic.

“I’m just hoping that, you know… that Claire’s okay,” Chris said, as they turned a corner into another hallway, this one lined with doors, reprints of famous paintings, etiolated ferns and snake-plants in cracked ceramic pots. Inert security cameras stared at them from the ceiling like calm cyclopean insects. “She’s tough, I know. But this place? It’s like a fucking gulag, Jill.”

“Relax,” she told him. “She’s fine, Chris. She survived Raccoon City without you, right?” Jill glanced over her shoulder. Why did it feel like they were being watched? “You get that feeling we’re not alone?” she asked. Then, mostly to herself, “I swear to fucking God, if there’s another tyrant here…”

“I think,” Chris said, amused, “if there was a Nemesis wandering around here, Jill, we’d have known by now.”

“Gotta point,” she conceded. “Would have been eating a rocket or two by now.”

“You know you’re on Umbrella’s shit-list when they send a giant with a fuckin’ rocket launcher after you,” Chris said, chuckling, pieces of shattered ceramic crunching under his boots. “I saw those cameras,” he said. “Maybe we can find a security room and look through the CRT feeds for some sign of Claire.”

“Probably lots of security rooms on this island,” she agreed. “Umbrella wouldn’t want word of their fucking concentration camp reaching the media.”

It didn’t take them long to find one of those security rooms. A placard on one of the doors in the hallway read SECURITY, and beneath that, a placard in red that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. It had an electronic lock, but someone had ripped the thing off, and now it dangled by its wires like a dislodged eye, sparking. “I’ll head in first,” Chris told her, nudging the door open with his boot. “Watch my back, Jill.”

“Sure,” she said, glancing left, then right. Nobody, dead or otherwise, in the hallway. She followed him into the room.

A fan turned slowly on the ceiling, the shadows of its blades scudding acrossrough plaster walls where several cockroaches skittered between cracks. A man’s stiff corpse was zip-tied to a chairwith his throat cut, his shirt crusted with blood. “Security officer,” Chris said, unclipping the man’s blood-sticky ID card. “Paul Steiner. He’s been dead for a while. Maybe a day or less.”

Jill shook her head. “Poor bastard,” she remarked, and strode over to the CRT monitors. Some feeds showed the exterior and interior of the training facility, while others displayed the prison compound. And what a prison compound, Jill thought, wrinkling her nose. Concrete walls topped with razor-wire, chain-link pens that looked like something on a cattle-farm, and on one of the monitors was a yard, three concrete posts within it, and a wall stained with dark splatters. “They had fucking firing squads,” she said.

“Not such a poor bastard now, huh?”

“How does anyone do this kind of work?” Jill asked, shaking her head. She’d asked the same question in Raccoon City, then later in NEST-2, and now she’d asked it here, and still had no answers. “How do they go to sleep every night after watching people lined up against a fucking wall and shot? Is there some kind of clause in Umbrella’s fucking contract that says you have to be a certified fucking psychopath to work for them?”

Chris sat down at the monitoring station and said, “It’s fear. They know if they open their mouths, they’ll be next. It’s a matter of not rocking the boat.” He started tapping something out on the keyboard. “Like how Brad sided with Irons.”

Jill frowned. She’d been pissed at Brad about that,maybe had even hated him, up until he’d saved her life in The Blackjack Bar.She guessed it was kind of like that with Umbrella’s low-rung employees. They just needed a push, or at least left with nothing to lose. “What’re you doing, anyway?” she asked.

“Looking through all these feeds from the day Leon got the e-mail, to now. I need to know if Claire’s okay, or if she—” he glanced at the feed of the execution yard and his voice caught “—I don’t even want to think about that.”

“You don’t give Claire enough credit,” Jill said, moving away from the monitoring station and sweeping the room for any unpleasant surprises, finding nothing. Steiner hadn’t been bitten—she’d double-checked—so he wasn’t coming back. She returned to Chris and sat down in the chair beside him. “But that’s just an older sibling thing, I guess. Always worrying. I wouldn’t know what that’s like. I’m an only child.”

“But you have parents. Same thing,” Chris said, playing through timestamps, his mouth a thin, hard line. “I’m all Claire’s got, and she’s all I got.”

“Not true,” Jill said, looking at him. “You’ve got me, Chris.”

He looked at her and smiled.

While Chris combed through security footage, Jill occupied her time with a deck of cards she’d found in a drawer, and then, after several rounds of Solitaire, she sat down, kicked her muddy boots up on the monitoring station, pulled the bill of her old S.T.A.R.S hat over her eyes,and napped.

Then, after what had felt like only a few minutes, Chris was shaking her awake and saying, “There’s someone on the island, Jill. Alive.”

She pushed the bill of her hat up and squinted at the monitors, her vision blurred at the edges by sleep. Chris had paused the recording. In it was a blond man in black fatigues, though hisback was turned toward the camera and the resolution was grainy. Jill could barely make out the H.C.F stamped on the back of his Kevlar vest. The timestamp placed the video at around four hours ago. “He seems familiar,” she said.

“That’s not the craziest thing,” Chris said. “Watch.” He rewound the video, then played it.

The man in the video was running so fast that the motion sensors on the camera were barely able to track him. He streaked across the yard, then jumped a twenty-foot wall topped with razor-wire with the ease of a pole-vaulter. Jill stared. “Did you increase the speed?” she asked, and looked at him.

Chris shook his head. “No,” he said, “that was normal speed.”

"And he really jumped that wall?"

"Yes."


	30. An Uncomfortable Cross-Examination, Among Other Things

“Where the fuck are we going?”

“Grayson, hush.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m some little kid, Lex.”

They turned another corner, passed a wall papered with yellowing fliers and posters he remembered seeing as a kid. The sub-levels of the facility had been shuttered since the 80s; Alfred had converted the facility into a transport terminal, and had fired most of the research staff, only keeping a handful of scientists that were, more or less, just there to take some of the research load off Umbrella’s more lucrative labs.

Alexia stopped walking and looked at him. She had this way of conducting herself that left no movement wasted, as if every moment in her life was deliberate, part of some scene in a perfectionist’s play. Behind her, a researcher with an 80s mullet smiled on faded laminate, Umbrella’s motto printed in italicized Eurostile below him: _P_ _reserving the health of the people_. Below that was printed: _Benefits enrollment_ _deadline_ _Oct 05 – Oct 10._ _Contact HR ASAP._

One of Alexia’s old internal letters was still tacked on the wall beside the mullet-researcher, though the paper was brittle and curling at the edges, and it read:

_To All Employees:_

_Due to an unprecedented uptick in demand, work-loads will be increasing, and mandatory overtime will be required of all employees to ensure the influx of orders are fulfilled. All further request-offs will be denied until further notice._ _Umbrella apologizes for the inconvenience, and thanks all of its employees for your valuable hard work_ _and your understanding_ _._

_Alexia Ashford_

_Director of Antarctic Operations_

_Chief Researcher of Antarctic Virology Labs_

“What are you staring at?” Alexia asked, puzzled.

“The wall behind you,” Grayson said, and shook his head. “Took me back, I guess.” He’d found one of his father’s old suits, and though the waistcoat was a bit tight around the chest, it fit him surprisingly well, cut an impressive figure that Alexia had made a point to comment on in several slobbery degrees of _down, girl._ Though Grayson couldn’t help but think that he looked, in that suit, like a funeral director.

Alexia raised an eyebrow and looked behind her. "Really?" she said, and looked at him. "A bloody internal letter and some posters makes you nostalgic? You're funny, Grayson." She started to walk away, and he followed. "Nobody's been down in this part of the facility since I went into cryostasis," she told him, her high-heels clicking sharply against the glossy concrete floor. "I gave Alfred the express order to keep it shuttered, as I didn't want anyone happening across my cryotank. It was unlikely that anyone would, of course, but I consider and prepare for all variables." She shot him a smirk over her shoulder, adding, "Though nothing could have prepared me for how bloody well fit you've gotten."

"All for you," he said, and grinned. Then he asked, "So where are we going?"

"Patience, Grayson," she said, descending a concrete stairwell, the yellow latex paint on it faded and peeling. "You act as if I'm leading you to the gallows."

Sometimes, he thought, it certainly felt that way. "You ever get nostalgic?" he asked, staring at the back of her head. Her hair was so pale that it was almost white, and the fluorescent lights burned it into a platinum corona.

“I’ve never really been the overly sentimental type,” she said. “No sense in dwelling in the past, Grayson. When one gets stuck in a quagmire, one works to get out of it, not to sink into it.”Alexia looked over her shoulder. Her shoulders were broad and thin, the flesh, in those lights, the color of milk. “That’s always been a problem for you, hasn’t it? Moving on.”

“Yeah,” he admitted, nodding. Grayson gave her a sheepish smile, and said, “Wish I could be like you, Lex. Maybe it’s a by-product of your intelligence? Everyone around you, I guess, has always moved at a snail’s pace, while you’ve always moved at light-speed. So you don’t know how to slow down, and when you can’t slow down, you can’t get stuck.” He paused. “Sorry,” he said, after a moment, “it sounded better in my head.”

“I understood your meaning,” she said, and smiled. Her smile was something that belonged in magazines. It dripped charisma and confidence. Little wonder, Grayson thought, why Alfred had chosen to become her, to embody that unfaltering personality, because it was a personality that got things done and never second-guessed itself. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“That girl,” she said, and fell in step beside him, fixing him with her ice-blue eyes. “The one you’d mentioned before. Sherry?” Her expression was expectant.

“What about her?”

“I’m curious. Indulge me.”

“Already told you about her,” Grayson said, mostly because he didn’t want to discuss Sherry. If he discussed Sherry, then he’d start thinking about her more, and if he started thinking about her more, he’d start thinking about Annette and how he’d broken his promise of always being there for Sherry. And that was a weight he didn’t really need or want on his mind right now.

Alexia, however, was insistent. “You were close,” she remarked, something edging on suspicion in her voice.

“Yeah, she was Clancy’s little cousin. I saw her a lot.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You speak of her as though she’s your daughter, Grayson.” Alexia stopped walking and stared at him, her expression unreadable.

“What are you getting at, Lex?”

“Was Sherry really William’s daughter, Grayson? Or did Annette simply tell him that.”

“Seriously?” he said, staring back at her. “I was nineteen when Sherry was born.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?” Alexia asked. “Nineteen is old enough to father a child, Grayson, and people are foolish at that age.”

“How would you even know?” he asked, a little angrier than he’d meant to. “You were never nineteen, Lex. You were still in the fucking tank.”

She frowned, and suddenly the charisma and the confidence evaporated from her. “Is Sherry your biological daughter, Grayson?” she asked bluntly.

“No!” Grayson said, exasperated. He felt like he was being cross-examined by a prosecutor who was desperate for a conviction. “Don’t be stupid, Lex,” he continued, rubbing the space between his eyes. “She’s William’s kid. If you saw her, you’d know it. She looks like him around the face.”

Alexia sighed. “Good,” she said, and nodded slowly. “I was worried you’d—but you didn’t, so it doesn’t matter.” She paused, stared at him like a cat. “You didn’t, did you?”

“Did what?”

“Have children. You’re twenty-nine, Grayson. Old enough to have a child who’s already in the bloody double-digits.”

“What’s this sudden goddamn fixation with kids, Lex?”

“Nothing, I’m simply curious.”

“No,” he said, and shook his head. “I don’t have any kids.”

Alexia nodded, and she almost looked relieved, and something else: nervous. “Good.” She went quiet for a moment, seemingly absorbed by her thoughts. Then, “Would you ever consider children, I wonder?” She looked at him, waiting.

“Are you—you asking me what I think you’re asking?”

“No,” she said, pointedly. “I’m relatively sure the T-Veronica rendered me sterile. I simply want to know if that will be an issue between us, down the road.”

“You don’t sound so sure about the sterility thing.”

Alexia ignored him. “Grayson, is it going to be a problem or not?”

He thought about that for a few moments. “Yeah,” he said, finally, “it might be. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

She nodded, and didn’t say anything else.

Eventually, they came to a part of the facility that used to be BOW storage; but the BOWs had been moved five years ago to the NESTs, and to Umbrella Europe’s facilities. Now it was just unused space, a bunch of cooler rooms with nothing in them. Alexia punched her override code into the electronic lock on a gray-painted steel door, and the door beeped its confirmation, the magnetic locks thudding out of place. She opened the door, a burst of frigid air hitting him like an icy fist, and then she stepped inside.

Steve was inside, huddled in his arctic gear between empty bio-hazard crates crusted with ice. “Grayson?” he said, scowling. He looked even more banged up than before; his right eye was swollen, and bruises and cuts mottled his face. “I’m not even fuckin’ surprised you’re with this crazy bitch.” The palms of his hands were skinned, his fingers raw and bloody. “I told Claire you couldn’t be trusted, asshole. I _told_ her.”

“What the hell did you do to him, Lex?”

“A giant fuckin’ tentacle came outta nowhere and dragged me and Claire through the snow,” Steve said through the bloody, chipped ruin of his teeth. “Next thing I know, I’m in this fuckin’ place, and this bitch,” and he pointed at Alexia, “is tellin’ me she’s got plans for me.” He stood up and yelled, spittle flying, “Where’s Claire, you psycho bitch? What did you do to her?”

“Don’t worry about Claire,” Alexia said, deliberately cutting her hand on the sharp corner of a steel shelf. “I’m still not done with you, boy.” She grabbed Steve’s throat and squeezed, and his face started turning purple. “You killed my brother,” Alexia said icily, the smell of burnt flesh filling the room. “Shot him like a bloody animal, you wretched little fuck.”

Without thinking, Grayson grabbed Alexia’s arm and yanked her away from Steve, who stumbled back with a gasp, a charred handprint around his neck. “You’re better than this,” he said. Her hand glistened with blood, and it smelled of sulfur and butane. “He’s just a kid, Alexia.”

“A kid who murdered my brother,” she spat.

“I know.”

She looked at Steve and hissed, “I’m not finished with you.” Then Alexia looked at him and said, “I’m disappointed, Grayson. Utterly disappointed.” She stormed off, and forgot to close the door, or perhaps had just assumed that he would close it for her.

Steve looked at him, confused. “Look,” Grayson said, once he was sure Alexia was gone, “you need to run, kid. Find Claire, and get the fuck outta here. If Alexia catches you again, you’re dead.”

“Why are you helpin’ me?” Steve asked. “I killed Alfred.”

“I haven’t forgotten, but Alfred, much as I loved him, made his bed and wound up having to sleep in it. Permanently. Karma’s a bitch. I would know.” Grayson frowned. “Look,” he said, “I’m not gonna be able to help you again. So make it count, kid. Get outta here. I’ll do my best to keep Alexia occupied.”

“She’s gonna murder you,” Steve said. “Alexia finds out you’d helped me, you’re dead, man.” He shook his head, then admitted, “Claire was right about you.” He looked at him. “You should come with us, Grayson. You’re only gonna be alive for as long as Alexia thinks you’re entertaining. She’s psycho, dude.”

“Alexia won’t kill me,” Grayson said. “Put me in the doghouse, sure, but never kill me. Trust me, between Alfred and her, she’s the reasonable one.”

“That’s… really not sayin’ much, man.”

Grayson shrugged.

“You’re fuckin’ nuts,” Steve said. “So whatever, you wanna chance it with the crazy bitch, that’s on you. Me? I’m gonna find Claire and get the fuck outta here. And, uh, thanks.” He hurried away.


	31. A Tentacle and a Dead Guy

Claire sat up, her hairline sticky with blood, and shivered. She prodded experimentally at the bruise on her forehead, recoiling from the pain, and looked around. Some kind of cooler room, she decided. Maybe for chemical storage. But she’d been inside the snow-truck… Whatever Steve had seen in the mirror, it had dragged her back to the Antarctic facility.

As cognizance washed over her in slow waves, Claire became aware of how much her body hurt, and how cold she was. Shuddering, she checked her extremities, found she’d somehow broken nothing, and there were no signs of frostbite either, thanks to the layered arctic gear she wore; though some of it had been torn from her trawl through the snow, it was still in pretty good shape, all things considered. At least, she thought, it kept her warm enough, and that was all she could really ask for in Antarctica.

She stood up and tried the door, found it was locked. She didn’t see a keyhole, so she assumed it was electronic. Her breath steamed in the air. Ice crusted the shelves, the empty crates, pieces of inertequipment. A cooling fan rattled in its nacelle, blowing a continuous stream of frigid air, and Claire had to duck behind a stack of crates to keep her face from freezing up.

Folding her arms across her chest, Claire wandered the room and looked for a way out, before whatever had put her in here came back. “Bingo,” she said aloud, spotting an old vent, just big enough for her to squeeze into, behind a stack of pallets. Sherry had gotten around the RPD in the vents, and if a kid could do that, so could she.

The grate was a bit rusted, and it only took a few solid kicks to loosen it. She moved it to the side, got on her hands and knees and stuck her head inside. The vent went left and up toward the cooling fan, and right, toward a junction. She belly-crawled right, her shoulders touching the sides; it was a tight fit, and the whole time Claire felt the very real terror of getting stuck in there, of dying in the vents like some over-sized rat. But she pushed on to the junction, looked left, then right. Left led to deeper shadow, and there might have been a drop at the end of it, so Claire shimmied right instead andkept going.

She saw a body up ahead at the dead-end, felt her heart shudder. A man in bloodytechnician’s coveralls. A grate stood on her right, flickering lights beyond it. She tried it, found the grate was stuck. Clairerammed it with her shoulder in a panic. The man roused with a groan, started crawling toward her. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” she said to herself, and she threw her shoulders into it again.

The man’s glaucous eyes stared hungrily at her, and he wailed, gore bubbling up from his throat like regurgitated jelly and dripping from his chin.

She smashed against the grate again, and this time it crumpled, popped. Claire scrabbled out of the vent and clambered to her feet. The man grabbed her ankle, and she twisted around, brought her other foot down on his head. She stomped again, hard,his brittle skull giving way under her boot with a crunch, and then the man stilled, a soupy mixture of brain and blood puddling on the water-stained concrete.

Claire sagged against the wall, sweating, her heart jackhammering in her chest. _Too close_. A low-pressure sodium light flickered above her, washed the hallway in a sickly orange light. Pipes snaked along the walls and ceiling, brownish icicles dripping from them, and the floor was slick with black ice. Faded, damp Umbrella posters crusted the walls, each one displaying some company reminder to employees, a hazard warning or safety protocol, and the graphics and typography on them were old, maybe late 60s or early 70s. Wherever she was, Claire decided, it was likely the oldest part of the Antarctic facility.

She started walking, careful not to slip on the ice, and turned a corner into an identical hallway. This one was lined with doors, each one equipped with an electronic lock, the little lights on them winking red. Some of the doors had vertical shatterproof windows like the classroom doors in her college, and when she peered through the glass, she saw lab equipment that looked as if it had been cutting-edge twenty years ago.

A placard mounted to one of the doors read HOT LAB 01. “Must be in a research wing,” she said to herself, and walked on.

She paused, hearing something up ahead. Claire waited, comforted by the weight of the gun in her hand.

A shadow slithered in the semi-darkness, and she wondered if maybe she was seeing things, had banged her head a little harder than she’d thought. _No_ , she told herself, _you’re not_ _crazy_. Something _was_ slithering, and it was coming her way.

Claire wasn’t sure what the fuck she was looking at. At first, she’d thought it was some mutant snake—Jill had mentioned the giant snake she’d encountered in the Arklays—but soon realized it was some sort of tentacle, like the tendril of some enormous prehistoric plant, and it was covered in a fuzzy layer of reddish barbs.

Her first instinct was to shoot, but the thing didn’t seem to notice her. As it crept closer, Claire flattened herself against the wall, holding her breath. It was headed in the direction of the vent she’d kicked out, or at least it had seemed that way, and she wondered if, whatever it was, it had heard the noise, maybe had even sensed her movement when she’d tussled with that zombie.

She tried to run. The thing suddenly snapped around and came at her, and she bolted, firing a few rounds into its caterpillar-haired body. It made a noise like a wounded animal, greenish-blue liquid trickling from its wounds and beading on the ground with a noise like sizzling grease.

Claire scurried, narrowly avoiding the thing by ducking right, and thenshe zigzagged down the hallway and swung around a corner. She could hear the vine-thing crashing through things behind her, and she turned, popped off three shots. The tendril slowed, and after she emptied the rest of her clip into it, it went limp and retreated with a groan, leaving in its wake a fizzing stream of fluid that smelled of decaying plant-matter and chemicals.

Whatever it was, Claire knew it would be back soon, and so she went inside the first roomthat wasn’t locked, wanting to be anywhere but that hallway.

Barricading the door with whatever wasn’t bolted down or too heavy to carry or push, she slumped against the wall andreloaded her gun. Only two clips left, plus the one she’d loaded into the gun, which meant that she only had three chances to beat the thing back once it returned from licking its wounds, and those were some real shitty odds.

A counter and some stools stood on her left,lab equipment on her right. A large window opposite the door looked into some sort of operating theater, and a body lay on the op-table in there, wrappedin grimy plastic. The door to the operating theater was electronically locked, and Claire could see another door inside the theater, just beyond the body, that looked like it could be an elevator.

Since she didn’t know the password to the door, Claire resorted to brute-forcing her way inside the theater: she grabbed a stool and smashed the observation window. Setting the stool down, she climbed over the sill and was greeted by the ripe, nauseatingly sweet stench of rot, and it was coming from the body.

“You’re definitely not gonna be getting up,” she said to the body. “Smell way overripe.”

Part of the plastic had peeled back, and Claire could see the decayed face of a man with clumps of reddish hair still clinging to his skull, an emerald earring glinting in his ear.He’d mutated: several sinewy appendages, like spider legs, had sprouted from his back, hanginglimply off the sides of the op-table. His corpse had started to liquefy, putrid flesh oozing from the plastic and dripping to the floor. Claire gagged, tasting the edge of vomit in her mouth.

The door on the other side of the theater was an elevator, and she entered its bright chromed interior with a grateful sigh. Wherever it went, she decided, it was better than down here. She thumbed UP on the panel, and the elevator hummed to life, the doors rattling shut, and it started its ascent. “Hope you’re doing better than me, Steve,” she said to nobody, and slouched against the wall.


	32. Intermission: Old Foes

"You didn't see anyone else on the cameras, Chris?"

"No," he said, "most of the feeds were knocked out."

That didn't surprise Jill; the island had been attacked, that much was obvious from all of the damage. At least half the island was on fire or buried under debris, and smoke choked the air, made it reek of burnt fuel and rubber.

"Whoever that guy on the camera's with, they attacked the island and wanted to cover up the fact they'd been here," Jill said, as they cut across the training yard. "Who do you think he's with anyway?" She looked at Chris. "WilPharma, maybe? TriCell?" Jill frowned, then said, "Hear the Chinese have been interested in acquiring Umbrella's dirty little secrets, too."

"Wouldn't be surprised if they had a hand in it," Chris told her. "Like a bunch of fuckin' vultures trying to pick the corpse clean before there's nothin' left but bones."

A few minutes later, they shouldered through a squeaky wrought-iron gate, and found themselves in front of some ornate, porticoed building that looked like a palace, a stained glass transom glittering above its carved double-doors. The grounds around it were manicured, shot through with flagstone walkways lined with colorful flowerbeds, topiaries, graceful queen palms, and gas lamps. One of the gas lamps, Jill noticed, had been snapped in two.

"This is where you saw the guy on the camera?" she asked.

Chris nodded. "Yeah," he said, looking around. "Let's fan out, see if we can find anything that might clue us into who this asshole's working for."

The doors to The Palace creaked open, and out strode the man from the camera. "No need, Chris," the man said, and smiled. His smile was like something that had been programmed. "And Jill? My, what a lovely reunion this is turning out to be. My two favorite subordinates, together."

"Wesker?" Jill said, her eyes widening. "No. You died."

"I _saw_ you die," Chris said.

 _"_ I did die," Wesker said. "You wasted your time coming here, Chris. Claire isn't here anymore."

Chris threw a punch, but Wesker countered, sent him sprawling on his ass. Jill fired a shot, and though the bullet hit Wesker squarely in his center mass, he walked on, unfazed.

"What the fuck," Jill said.

Wesker ran, so fast that her eyes couldn't even track him, and swatted her aside as if she weighed nothing at all. Jill ragdolled across the wet flagstone, skinning her palms and banging the back of her head against something with an impact so loud and visceral that she was sure her skull had cracked. Touching the back of her head, she felt a huge, sore lump there, but no blood.

"Where's Claire?" Chris yelled, launching himself at Wesker and tackling him to the ground, his muscles straining with the effort to keep Wesker pinned beneath him. Straddling his chest, Chris punched until his knuckles turned bloody and bruised, each blow connecting with an audible thud. But Wesker just grinned the whole time with a sort of feral ecstasy, his teeth red with blood.

Wesker kicked Chris away and stood up, spitting blood from his mouth, the bruises and cuts on his face healing as if someone had their thumb on the fast-forward button. His sunglasses were shattered, and now he stared at them through the cracked lenses with eyes the color of molten metal. "She's in Antarctica," Wesker said, removing his sunglasses and tossing them aside. "I found an e-mail while I was wiping the island's data. Pity you won't get to read it."

"You motherfucker," Chris said, through his teeth.

Jill got to her feet, feeling dizzy, a little nauseous. A concussion, she decided. Her legs felt like rubber, her vision fuzzy around the edges. She sagged against a gas lamp and vomited. "Chris," she slurred, "I'm not feeling so hot."

"Guess she banged her head a little too hard," Wesker said.

"I got you, Jill," Chris told her, getting her around the middle and steadying her on her feet.

"Now," Wesker said, and popped his neck, his shoulders, "my business is concluded on Rockfort. I'd kill you both now, but my employer has me on a tight schedule. I need to be in Antarctica by tomorrow. Deadlines, you know?" He paused as if considering something, then recited a set of coordinates. "I'll see you there, Chris," he said. "We'll finish what we started in the Arklays."


	33. The Truth About Alexander

"You okay?"

Alexia winced. "I'm fine," she said, sweating. "Redfield got out of the cooler and bloody shot me."

He gave her a strange look. They'd been holed up, alone, in Alexander's laboratory in the mansion for the last hour while Alexia played with the equipment. Something about T-Veronica, she'd said, and when Grayson had asked for elaboration, Alexia had just mumbled about synthesizing a new sample because the virus was too volatile for long-term storage, and then something about Steve. "Alexia," he said, "nobody but us has been up here. How the fuck could Redfield have shot you?"

"She didn't shoot _me—_ never mind. Forget it." Alexia wiped her face on her lab coat, then resumed fiddling with the centrifuge.

"You sure you're okay?"

"I'm bloody fine," she snapped.

"Jesus," he said. "Calm down. You want some tea? Coffee?"

"Coffee," she said, without looking up from her work.

Grayson leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, but she ignored him. He frowned. "What crawled up your ass and died?"

"Nothing. Coffee, please."

One thing he'd learned about women was that whenever they said nothing was wrong, everything was wrong. But Grayson left it alone; she'd cool off eventually. "Be back," he said, and left.

The hallway was dimly lit by antique oil lamps that cast everything in a greasy yellowish light. Suits of armor stood silent vigils along walls wainscoted in dark wood. Eerie landscapes framed in French gold-leaf hung on the walls, and here and there were showcases that displayed fine porcelain, glittering gold and silver treasures, handmade dolls on beds of dark velvet…

He turned a corner, walked right into someone. Claire stared at him, bewildered. "Grayson?" she said. "Holy shit."

"How the hell did you get in here?"

"Elevator," she said.

Grayson knew the one; it was in Edward's study and went down to his old laboratory. "You need to get outta here," he said. "Alexia's here. She knows you got out, said you shot her."

"I shot a weird tentacle thing," she said, puzzled.

That confirmed what he'd suspected: Alexia controlled the plant. How she controlled it was another question entirely, but Grayson guessed it had something to do with biochemicals or electrical signals—things far beyond his understanding—and nothing to do at all with psychic powers. "You need to get outta here," he repeated. "Fast. Before Alexia sends another one after you."

"Wait," Claire said, brow furrowing. "Alexia's real?"

"It's a long story."

"And you're saying Alexia sent that tentacle thing after me?"

Grayson nodded.

"Holy shit," Claire said, and massaged her forehead as if a migraine had suddenly struck her. "How the fuck do I always end up in weird shit?" she asked. "First Raccoon City, now fucking tentacle women. I swear to fucking God, I feel like I'm in some campy horror movie."

"Yeah," he said, "I know that feeling."

"Have you seen Steve anywhere?"

Grayson shook his head.

"Shit," Claire said. "Look, you should come with me, Grayson." She looked at him. "I saw some gross shit downstairs, and I bet Alexia had something to do with it."

"Gross shit?

"Some weird mutant guy," she said. "Been dead for years, looks like. Had an emerald earring."

Now he knew where Alexander had gone, and now he had a million questions for Alexia. "Good to know," he said. "Look," he continued, thumbing over his shoulder, "if you go around that corner and follow the hallway down, take that first left. It'll take you outta here. When you're in the hydroponic yard—you'll know what I mean when you're there—cross it and go down that corridor there. There's an elevator that'll take you up to the main facility. I dunno how you're gonna get out of Antarctica, but I wish you the best, Claire. Maybe there's a snow-truck still around somewhere."

"What do you mean maybe?"

"Alexia destroyed the trucks."

"There's no other way?

"Place gets supplies—has to—but the next shipment isn't due until January."

"Goddammit," Claire said.

"Goddammit indeed." Alexia appeared at the end of the hallway, lit from behind in a nimbus of sickly lamplight. "You're Claire Redfield," she said, walking toward them, her footsteps muffled by the dusty Oriental runner. A scalpel flashed in her hand, and she slashed her palm, the blood erupting into flames like a sorceress's trick, filling the air with the clawing reek of chemical hellfire. "Your little friend killed my brother," Alexia said, the firelight chasing shadows across the delicate planes of her face, catching in her eyes like ruby pinpricks. "And you let him, Redfield."

"Alexia, stop," Grayson said, stepping between them and raising his hands, palms turned outward. "Claire wasn't there when Alfred died. It was just Steve."

"Who _you_ let get away!" Alexia shouted, her eyes flashing. "I gave you one simple test of loyalty, Grayson—to close the bloody door on Burnside—but you let him go, told him to leave."

"Alexia, he's seventeen-years-old. A kid! Alfred killed his dad."

"Now you dare turn on my brother, too?"

"Grayson, we need to go," Claire said, grabbing his arm and trying to pull him away. "She's gonna kill you."

"She's not," he said, and lunged at Alexia, wresting her conflagrant arm and pushing her against the wall, the intense heat of the flames making him sweat, searing his skin. "Go!" he yelled at Claire, finding it increasingly difficult, despite being much bigger and heavier than Alexia, to keep her restrained. She was far stronger than her tall, willowy form suggested, and it was only a matter of moments, Grayson knew, before she broke free of the bear-hug.

"Grayson—"

"Go, Claire," he hissed, gritting his teeth, straining to keep Alexia up against the wall. The flesh on his arm had burned to a deep, raw red."I can't keep her still much longer."

Claire gave him a worried, apologetic look, said, "I'll find you later, I promise," and she bolted like a spooked animal.

Alexia threw him off her, his foot catching on the runner, and he went down hard. "You let her get away," she said, and she tried to chase Claire, but Grayson grabbed Alexia's ankle and yanked her to the floor, straddling her back and using the full weight of his body to pin her down. He knew she could have bucked him off her, but she lay there instead, the flames going out in a cloud of acrid smoke.

"Why?" Alexia said miserably, bunching the carpet between her fingers. "They killed Alfred, Grayson." He didn't need to see her face to know that she was crying.

"Steve killed Alfred," Grayson reminded her, the skin on his arm smoothing, reverting to its former tan. He stood up, once he was sure she'd cooled off. "Claire had nothing to do with it," he told her. "Let her go, Lex. For Christ's sake, just let her go."

Alexia hugged him and buried her face in his shirt, and it was hard to imagine that this woman had had anything to do with Alexander's death. But who else could it have been? "I got more bad news," he said, and stroked her hair. "I know what you did to Alexander."

She looked up at him, tears rimming her wet, pink eyes, and suddenly her expression chilled as if a pall of ice had settled over it, the emotion evaporating from her face. "You do?" she said.

"Claire found his body in Edward's laboratory."

Alexia climbed to her feet. "Let's return to father's laboratory, and I'll tell you everything."

And she did.

*

Someone knocked at the door. Judging by its politeness, and the fact the door hadn't been flung open yet, she knew it wasn't Grayson. Alexia turned down the volume of her record player, put down her pen and closed her diary, and said, "Come in."

Scott entered, setting down a tray of tea on the end-table beside the door. He looked disconcerted, grim. "Alexander found my research notes," he said without preamble, pouring tea into her cup, then adding the milk and sugar.

They had devised the cipher together, but had intentionally designed it so that neither of them could read it without her key. "It will simply look like a bunch of gibberish to him, Scott," she said soothingly. "Father can't read it."

"Alexander's threatening Grayson if we don't hand over the key." He set her tea down in front of her.

"Threatening?"

"Spencer found out about the Origin virus," he said. "Alexander must have told him. Spencer wants Grayson transferred to the Arklay Lab."

Alexia stared, disbelieving, her heart lurching uncomfortably in her chest. "Why?"

"For Project W," Scott said.

"I thought that project concluded," she said.

"Only the first phase," Scott said, and sat down on the edge of her bed. "My guess? Because of how well Grayson's taken to Origin, Spencer likely wants to advance him to the second phase of the project as a fourteenth candidate."

"We can't let him do this, Scott."

"We can't let Alexander have the key either, princess. Even if we did, I wouldn't trust him to keep his word," he said, and shook his head. "If Umbrella gets their hands on the Origin sample? Who knows what Spencer will do with it." Scott sighed, buried his face in his hands. "I never meant for my virus to be used as a weapon," he said. "I did it for Grayson. He was going to be born with birth defects, and I couldn't have a son that—I made a mistake. I wanted to play God and make a better human species, and now? Now Spencer's going to get his hands on Origin."

"Father wants the same for me," Alexia said, quietly. "That's why Code: Veronica was created. To make me the bloody Eve to Grayson's Adam."

"Code: Veronica was blatant plagiarism," Scott said. "Alexander took all the credit for the work I did, and didn't even have the decency to treat you like kids. Princess, if it's any consolation, I never wanted any of that for you." He reached over, engulfing her hands in his paw-like ones, and squeezed gently. "Your dad and Edward wanted that, but all I ever wanted was for you and Alfred to be happy." Scott smiled. "Though," he teased, "I wouldn't be disappointed if you and Grayson gave me grandkids someday."

She managed a smile, just barely, and thought about cryostasis and how long she'd be asleep, and whether or not Grayson would have moved on by then with someone else. "That's still quite a long way away, Scott," she said.

Scott chuckled. "No pressure, princess. Don't worry."

"We can't let father get away with this," Alexia said, meeting Scott's eyes, her expression chilling. "We need to do something, Scott."

Scott stared at her with gravity, an uncharacteristic stoniness in his face. Silence hung thick in the air between them. Then, finally, Scott said, "I'll take care of Alexander." He glanced at her father's teacup on the tray. "If I slip Alexander some Lorazepam, he'll be out like a light." His gaze shifted to her. "Meet me down in your grandfather's laboratory. Then you can do whatever you need to do with Alexander."

*

"Dad helped you kill Alexander?"

Alexia shook her head. "Scott simply brought Alexander down there," she said, perched on the stool like a pale heron on a bollard, draping one long white leg over the other. "I injected father with the T-Veronica, after Alfred had his fun with father and a scalpel. Alexander died from the mutation, and I left him there to rot. He deserved nothing else, Grayson."

Grayson said nothing. So Alexander had wanted to offer him up as a sacrificial lamb to Spencer and get in his good graces, while his father had injected him with a virus because he hadn't wanted a son with birth defects. He couldn't really say which was worse. "Some life I have," he said bitterly. "Either an experiment, or a correction."

"You're neither of those things to me," Alexia said. "I love you, Grayson, even if I'm terrible at showing it." She stood up, walked over and sat beside him on the counter. "I'm sorry for what happened in the hallway. I didn't mean to burn you."

"I'm sorry for pinning you down like a criminal."

Alexia grinned lasciviously. "I would have liked it better had there been no clothes involved."

"Didn't realize you had kinks, Lex."

"Oh, I'm sure I have several. It simply remains to be seen what they are." She looked at him, still grinning. "Suppose we'll need to experiment, won't we? For now, however, we need to focus on finding Burnside."

"Lex…"

"He's not getting away with killing Alfred." Alexia paused. "Redfield, however," she said, and walked over to the centrifuge, punching a few buttons on the display, "I'm not focused on." She glanced back at him. "See? I'm capable of compromising."


	34. Intermission: Some Fates Worse Than Death

Steve had been grabbed again, just as he’d been grabbed from the snow-truck, and as he slowly came to, he found himself in a concrete room lit by halogen lights. Enormous steel coffins, each one stamped with the Umbrella logo and a bio-hazard decal, were racked up around him. Bundles of multicolored rubber cables hung from the ceiling like synthetic ganglia, and the air carried an antiseptic tang that reminded him of a doctor’s office.

He was strapped down in a chair, zip-ties cutting into his wrists and ankles, and his legs and arms ached deeply. The door, which stood opposite him, slid open with a hiss, and Alexia stepped inside. “You weren’t hard to recover,” she said, smiling the sort of smile he imagined belonging to serial killers. Her eyes, too, were the sort he imagined on serial killers: so pale and blue that they were almost luminous. “There isn’t anywhere in this facility you could go that I couldn’t find you, Burnside.”

“Fuck you,” he said, tasting the blood in his mouth.

“That’s rather impolite.” Alexia pushed her hands into the pockets of her crisp lab coat. “Tell me, Burnside,” she said, circling his chair like a patient buzzard, “what brings a seventeen-year-old boy to Antarctica?” A thoughtful pause. “You’re a senior in high-school, yes?” She leaned over his backrest, her face next to his, and he could feel the heat of her skin, the silky brush of her hair against his cheek. “Shouldn’t you be there with your little friends, preparing for university,” and Alexia traced the curve of his cheeks with her fingers, “and not—” she gouged his skin with her nails, made him jerk and yelp from the pain “—murdering a woman’s twin brother?”

“Alfred killed my dad,” Steve hissed, his cheeks burning where her fingernails had penetrated the skin, warm blood trickling down his face.

“You didn’t answer my question, little boy. Why are you here?”

“Umbrella,” he said, watching her in his periphery, “killed my mom, took me and dad. I helped him steal data from the company. He was a sysadmin.” Feeling brave, or at the very least resigned to his fate, Steve hawked and spat a gob of bloody phlegm at her, catching the lapel of her lab coat. “Good enough answer for you, bitch?”

Alexia struck him in the jaw, made his head snap sideways. His jaw hurt badly, and so did his neck. “Good enough, I suppose,” she said coolly. “So your father found himself on Rockfort for stealing from _my_ company. Is that supposed to make me pity you?”

“Oswell Spencer owns Umbrella. Everyone knows that.”

Alexia stopped, put her hands on the armrests of the chair and leaned down, so their eyes met. If she wasn’t such a crazy bitch, he would have thought she was beautiful. Their faces were inches apart; he felt her warm breath on his skin. “Oswell Spencer stole Umbrella from the Ashfords,” she said matter-of-factly. “He’s doing little else than keeping my seat warm.”

“You’re as fuckin’ delusional as your brother,” Steve said, and that earned him another smack across the face, this one harder, more painful, than the last. “Best you got?” he asked, despite the pain. “Fuckin’ limp-wristed baby-bitch never hit nothin’ but the maid in her life.”

“If you think you’re going to get under my skin with such ridiculous insults, you’ll be sorely disappointed,” Alexia said, her tone never quite breaking its careful, icy tension. “I survived a pit of vipers at only ten-years-old.” She smiled without any warmth. “What were you doing at ten-years-old, Burnside?” she asked mildly. “Watching cartoons and playing with action figures?”

“Grayson ain’t here,” Steve observed aloud. “What’d you do to him?”

Alexia giggled, and her giggle sent a chill down his spine. “If you must know,” she said, “I fucked him silly, and now he’s sleeping. He won’t save you this time.”

Something long and sharp appeared in Alexia’s hand, and it took him a moment to realize that it was a hypodermic needle filled with colorless liquid. Panic set in, and his nerves started screaming. What the fuck was she going to inject him with?

“Don’t look so nervous,” Alexia said, giggling.

“Claire!” he screamed.

“Not feeling so tough now, Burnside?” she mocked, flicking the syringe to settle any air-bubbles, then ejecting a bit of excess liquid. “You won’t get out of here,” Alexia continued, holding his head still and needling him in the neck. “This,” she said, as he thrashed helplessly in the chair, his veins and capillaries filling with white-hot fire, “will be the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life.”


	35. Compromising is Key

Grayson started awake, sweating. Naked, he sat up in Alexia’s bed. As the last vestiges of REM fizzled out, subsumed by the slow wash of cognizance, he remembered that he was in Antarctica, not Raccoon City, not in the RPD fighting for his life, or down in NEST, watching Annette walk away for the last time. He didn’t dream about Raccoon City often, but when he did, the nightmares came hard and unrelenting like fists punching at him from all sides.

His throat felt like sandpaper, his mouth like cotton. Sliding out of bed, Grayson left the room and followed the hallway down to the bathroom. The bathroom was tiled in antique marble, and there was a clawfoot tub and shower, a pedestal sink, a beveled mirror. He turned the crystal knobs on the sink and splashed lukewarm water on his face, staring at his reflection in the fly-specked glass: dark-haired and gray-eyed, his skin the color of Alexia’s tea, which was more milk than actual tea…

 _Alexia_. “Shit,” he said aloud, and hurried away.

Grayson dressed, found her nowhere in the mansion. She could be anywhere, he thought: the Antarctic facility was huge and sprawling, a concrete wasp’s nest under the arctic permafrost with uncountable chambers. He decided to start with her laboratory; that seemed the likeliest place, as she’d spent hours there, shuttered away with her research. His gut-feeling turned out to be correct.

In this part of the facility, an expansion-grate cat-walk ringed a cavernous chamber, and an enormous, bulbous ant-hive that looked less like a hive, and more like an egg-sac that belonged to some alien species of spider. Its texture was that of dry cardboard, of the sort used in fast-food cup-carriers and egg cartons, and on it skittered mutant ants of some large Amazonian variant, fat and winged, some red, the rest black. He spotted a large ruby red ant crawling sluggishly among the drones, and knew that was the Queen.

“This particular species of ant,” Alexia said, leaning on the handrail of the cat-walk, “reproduces asexually. Every ant that you see is a clone of the Queen. All working in harmony through a complex language of pheromones to do as their Queen bids. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Where’s Burnside, Alexia?”

She looked at him. “Disposed,” she said.

“Where is he?”

Alexia shook her head. “I don’t know whether or not I find your newfound heroism attractive, Grayson, or dreadfully annoying—inconvenient, even.” She tipped her head on one side. “I’m leaning toward the latter, I think.”

“Alexia,” he warned.

She grinned with white teeth, and said, “Oh, I like that fire in your voice, Grayson.” Alexia approached, holding her gaze on him, her eyes stabbing down into his soul and shuddering it. “Burnside,” she said, “is in BOW Storage, and once he mutates completely, bio-hazard contingencies will trigger, and P-Epsilon gas will fill the chamber, killing him. But he won’t be mutating soon, oh no.” Subtle craziness made her eyes gleam. “I made certain that the dose of T-Veronica I gave him would drag on for as long as possible. Something I learned from my mistakes with father. I didn’t prolong his suffering enough.”

 _You’re insane._ “What the fuck happened to you in that tank?”

“Improvements.” Alexia touched his face, her fingertips exploring the cuts of his cheeks, the slight dip in his chin. “You’re upset with me,” she said.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You killed _a kid_ , Alexia.”

“Who killed my brother,” she said, pastels of irritation in her voice. “You were a cop, Grayson. I simply meted out justice. Surely you understand.” She stared at him for a moment, then said, “I kept my word about Redfield. I haven’t harmed her, nor will I harm her—unless she leaves me no choice. I do that for you.” A smile touched her lips, just barely. “Though,” she said, “I can’t promise the zombies won’t kill her.”

Grayson knew he had no right to be angry. He’d stood by while Alfred tortured and killed people. He’d stood by in Raccoon City while scared kids like Steve died,because his focus, his only concern, had been Annette and Sherry. Yet here he was, feeling as if he had some kind of moral pedestal to stand on, pretending that he actually gave a shit. And maybe he did give a shit, but not enough of one.He turned away from her and said, “I’m no better than you and Alfred.”

“No,” she said, with surprising candidness, “you’re not.”

“There are some things I care about,” Grayson said, almost defensive, and turned to face her again. “For whatever reason, you’re one of them. So is Sherry. And much as I don’t wanna admit it, I can’t deny that part of me hates Steve for killing Alfred.” He avoided her eyes, feeling ashamed, stripped naked by her assessment. “He would have killed you, too, maybe. I’m not entirely sad that he’s gone. But his death? That’s gonna haunt me for the rest of my life. Seventeen-years-old…”

Alexia regarded him blandly. “All this sentimentality is making me nauseous,” she said sharply, her words like tiny knives. “Have you finally picked your side?”

“My loyalty’s to you, Alexia,” he said, surprised at how quickly the words left his lips. “It always has been. That hasn’t changed.”

She giggled. “Shall I knight you?” she teased, and took his hand. “In seriousness, however,” Alexia said, brushing a few curls of hair from his eyes, “I’m relieved, Grayson. Pleased. I don’t know what I would do without you. You’ve been the only friend I’ve ever had besides Alfred, the one thing, I think, that keeps me grounded. Without you, I think I’d go completely mad.”

“You mean you haven’t?” he joked dryly. “You’re stuck with me, Lex.”

Alexia grinned. “I can think of far worse things than being stuck with a tall, handsome, and absolutely _fit_ man,” she said, walking alongside him, holding his hand, the normalcy of the gesture striking him as strange, somehow uncharacteristic of her. “But,” Alexia continued, leading him toward her office, “I think we should make it official, once we leave Antarctica.”

“You mean marriage?”

“I’m glad I don’t have to spell it out for you.”

He’d only thought about marriage when Annette had been alive, and he’d spent so long picturing himself with Annette that it was hard to imagine himself with anyone else, even Alexia. Still, Grayson loved Alexia, and he didn’t hate the idea of marrying her. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Beneath all the dumb brawn, there’s a brain. Kinda.” He poked her in the head, adding, “Maybe ‘bout a quarter the size of yours.”

“I don’t believe you give yourself enough credit, Grayson. You may be awful at maths, true, but you’re quite the creative.” She flashed him a smile as they entered her office, into the soft glow of a Victorian lamp, and said, “Remember all those little poems you used to write me?”

“Don’t remind me,” he said, sitting on the edge of her desk. “They were shit.”

“Considering you were only a boy when you’d written them, they were quite good.” Alexia rounded her desk and plucked a large leather-bound book from the bookcase, opening it. “Scott’s research notes,” she explained, and looked at him. “I had his notes bound.”

“Holy shit,” he said. Grayson stretched out his hand. “Can I see it?”

Alexia shrugged and passed it to him. He couldn’t read any of it; it was written in some kind of cipher. “Scott destroyed the original notes after he’d transcribed them in code. I helped him devise the code, a heavily modified Ottendorf cipher.”

“So where’s the key?”

“Safe,” Alexia said.

“You can’t tell me?”

“I promised Scott that I wouldn’t tell anyone, dear Grayson. Including you. And you know I always kept my promises to you, Scott, and Alfred.”

Grayson nodded and closed the book, passing it back to her. “So what now?” he asked, looking at her. “We just wait around in Antarctica and hope the supplies come, so we can hitch a ride back?”

“Supplies won’t be coming, darling,” Alexia said, tucking the book under her arm. “With zombies milling about, this facility is a bio-hazard. Umbrella won’t send anyone, not even a cleanup detail, I’m sure; this facility has been in decline for years, a negligible loss for the company. They won’t even send the USS or UBCS; it wouldn’t be cost-effective.”

“So we’re fucking stuck here?”

“Goodness, so quick to lose faith in me,” Alexia said, and leaned against her desk. “I’ve already arranged for a way out, my dear. They simply seem to be behind schedule. Unsurprising, really. The conditions are quite bad this far into the Antarctic interior.”

“You just said Umbrella wasn’t gonna send the USS or UBCS,” he pointed out.

“They aren’t,” she said. “They’re sending a team handpicked by Spencer.”

“Spencer knew about you?”

“Of course,” Alexia said. “I’m Spencer’s Jesus Christ, returned from the mountain to heal the leper. Him.”

Grayson snorted. “I thought you weren’t religious.”

“I’m not in the least,” she said, giggling. “But Scott’s biblical anecdotes stuck.”

“Alexia,” he said, and rose from her desk, “we can’t just leave Claire here. If nobody is coming, she’ll die. The non-perishables won’t last forever, and neither will the power; Umbrella’s gonna shut it down once you’re gone. No reason to pay the bills on a ghost facility.”

“That’s hardly my prob—”

“You said you always keep your promises to me, right? And you promised you wouldn’t kill Claire.”

“What are you suggesting, Grayson?”

“I thought you were a genius.”

“It was a rhetorical question,” she said, frowning. “You want me to bring the girl with us.”

“You promised, Lex.”

Alexia sighed, pinching the slender bridge of her nose. “Fine,” she said, after a moment. “Redfield will come with us, if she must. But once we’re back in the United States, she’s no longer our problem.”

Grayson hugged her. “Thank you,” he said, meaning it.

“You’re lucky I love you,” she grumbled. “But,” she said, “Redfield might not want to, Grayson. If Burnside meant anything to her at all, I doubt she’ll want to come along with his executioner.”

“She won’t have a choice if she wants to live.”

“As I said,” Alexia said, “when we’re in the United States, Redfield is no longer our problem. Understood? Bad enough that you want Sherry Birkin with you. We’re not rescuing every bloody stray child you happen across.”

“Wait, you’re actually considering Sherry?”

“ _Considering_ ,” she said pointedly. “I haven’t arrived at a decision yet.”

“She’s a good kid, Lex. I think you’d like her. You’re more alike than you’d think.”

“I haven’t arrived at a decision,” she repeated, and left it at that.


	36. A Conversation Between Enemies

Her legs ached, and exhaustion was creeping up on her. Apart from her blackout, she hadn’t slept since Rockfort. Or maybe before? Claire couldn’t remember.

Turning the knobs on the sink in an employee bathroom, she splashed her face with ice-cold water, then went back out into the hallway. Laboratories, inert behind wide Plexiglass windows, lined the hall, and a heaped custodial cart sat forgotten under the sodium-vapor lights. A thing that looked like a payphone was bolted to the wall opposite her, a laminate sheet taped on its divider that listed local-loop extensions. She took the handset off its hook, and though she heard the dial-tone, when she punched the emergency extension, nothing happened.

“Like it would’ve been that easy,” she muttered, jamming the handset back on the hook. A feeling of deja vu whorled over her, then, and she was hanging the phone up in the booth outside the Mizoil gas-station on the outskirts of Raccoon City...

She heard something thumping against a door up ahead, on the other side of it. Tugging the gun from its holster, Claire went to check it out. A steel door, several decals pasted to it that detailed safety and PPE procedures, and warned employees of bio-hazardous materials contained withinthe room. As most doors in this place, it was locked electronically.

“Hey,” Claire said.

The thumping stopped, and Steve said, “Claire?”

“Steve, is that you?”

“Yeah,” he said, panicked. “That crazy bitch locked me up in here. Had me zip-tied to a chair and everythin’, but I got free. ‘Cept this door—I can’t open it.”

“Alexia locked you in there?”

“Yeah. She’s real, Claire. Can’t fuckin’ believe it.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I ran into her.She’s some kinda mutant, I think. Like Birkin.”

“Who?”

“Never mind,” she said. “You okay at least?”

A long pause. Then, “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“That’s good,” Claire said, jiggling the handle to no effect. The door was sealed tight. “I’m gonna need to find the keycard for this lock. Or find some way to pry it open.” She jiggled the handle again; it didn’t budge. Claire sighed. “Think you can hang in there for a bit longer while I find it?”

Steve went quiet again. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “Think I can.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he repeated, and she heard the grimace in his voice. “Just make it quick, please. It sucks balls in here.”

“I’ll be back, Steve. Promise.” Claire figured she could find a keycard in the employee dormitories; that seemed as good a place as any to start. And if not the dormitories, maybe the offices. She just needed to figure out where those places were.Or, Claire thought, she could just take Alexia’s keycard. “But that,” Claire said aloud, “is fucking risky.”

It would probably be quicker anyway, Claire told herself, nabbing Alexia’s keycard, rather than Benny-Hilling around the place for dormitories and offices on only the slight chance either contained a keycard for the door. But Grayson wouldn’t be happy about her showing up again, especially after he’d risked his life to get her out of the mansion. Assuming, she thought, Alexia hadn’t already killed him.

Claire frowned. She hoped Grayson wasn’t dead. Sherry would be crushed.

She retraced her steps back to the mansion. The hydroponic yard bristled like bright green bacillus under the fluorescent lights, which were tuned to a brightness meant to simulate sunlight. The walls were painted like a summer sky, and for some reason, it made her sleepy if she looked at it too long.

Crossing the yard, Claire opened one of the doors with a groan and poked her head inside the foyer. A heady perfume of dead flowers, expensive cigars, and cognac (her brother liked to drink cognac on occasion, so Claire knew the smell well) wafted toward her, agitated her sinuses. Seeing nobody, Claire stepped inside and closed the door behind her, careful not to slam it.

She’d never really taken the time to notice before, but the mansion, for something that amounted to a dollhouse or a film-stage, was beautiful, made her think of a museum exhibit. _This exhibit portrays_ _the foyer of_ _a mid-nineteenth century English country house, generously donated_ _to_ _the museum by the Ashford Family_ …

Claire inched upstairs, edging through a door. Some kind of drawing room. A dusty fireplace stood on one side of the room, a gloomy landscape done in oils on the other. The walls were of some dark wood. Worn Victorian couches were crowded around a carved table of lacquered wood, a tea set and two silver candelabras atop it.

“Looks like my fucking grandma’s house,” she mumbled, turning a corner and slipping through a door.

Another hallway. This one made her feel claustrophobic. Showcases, suits of armor, tables, and paintings cluttered every inch of it, and she had to almost squeeze her way through like a rat in a tunnel. She wound up at another corner, in another hallway, this one lined with doors. And she recognized this place: this was where Grayson had saved her life.

She heard a door squeak open, and squeezed into the alcove behind a suit of old armor, her heart in her throat. Alexia appeared, and she was in a lab coat, leafing through papers on a clipboard. And she was coming toward her.

Claire, feeling a sudden rush of adrenaline and stupidity, sprang out from behind the armor, knocking it over with a clatter, and she hooked her arm around Alexia’s neck and pushed the gun to her head. “You scream, bitch, and I fucking swear, I’ll blow your brains out,” Claire said, dragging her into the nearest room, which happened to be the bathroom, and kicking the door shut.

“You will utterly regret this,” Alexia said, and the coldness in her voice made Claire’s skin crawl. But what was done was done, she thought, and there was no turning back now, no room for hesitation or regret. “Have you stopped to consider why you’re not dead yet, Redfield?”

Claire kept the gun on her, used her other hand to turn the knobs on the bathtub, and once it had filled about halfway, she shoved Alexia into the water and straddled her back. “Can’t use fire when you’re underwater,” she said, yanking Alexia’s head up, gun pressed to the back of her skull. “I need your keycard to Steve’s cell.” Alexia thrashed under her like a pissed shark, soaking her jeans; but Claire didn’t let go, just pressed down harder and reminded Alexia that there was a gun on her head.

“It’s too late for Burnside,” Alexia hissed.

Ignoring Alexia for the moment, Claire started digging through the soaked pockets of her lab coat, finally found the keycard at the bottom of one of them. Then, “What did you do to Steve?”

Alexia laughed, and her laugh turned her blood to ice. “Oh, you’ll see,” she said, and grinned, her make-up running, exaggerating her expression to something Joker-like.

Claire got off her and darted for the door. She slammed it shut, then quickly pushed a heavy showcase in front of it. Alexia struck at the door, and it started splintering at the hinges. “Shit, shit, shit,” Claire said, and ran.

As she tore down the hallway, a tentacle burst through the floorboards, splinters and chips of wood pelting the backs of her arms and neck. The thing swatted her headlong, and she barely managed to get back to her feet when it whipped down and nearly crushed her. Then the tentacle withdrew through the rent in the floor.

She heard a loud crack, then something pop and separate. A heavy object was hurled into the wall, shattered. Alexia rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway, still soaking wet, but the water was quickly evaporating into clouds of steam. “You made a fatal mistake, Redfield,” she said, the spark of a fire on her fingertips, a chemical stink souring the air. “You could have lived had you simply stayed away, but I can see now that our meeting will not end peaceably.” She smiled. “Not that I particularly mind. I’d rather kill you anyway. Loose ends, you see. I’ll simply tell Grayson it was self-defense.”

Claire shot Alexia three times, and though each bullet blew through her chest and splattered things with her blood, she continued walking: unhurried, calm. The blood sizzled like hot grease, scorched everything it had touched.

Alexia stopped, however, and the flames went out. The stink of sulfur and butane lingered, unpleasant and acrid. “Actually,” she said, and crouched in front of her. Her eyes were the eyes of an acute sociopath, her expression clinical. Claire wondered how Grayson could love someone with eyes like that. “I think I want you to live a little longer. I’d hate for my work to go without an audience.”

“You’re fucking insane,” Claire said.

“You know,” Alexia said, and stood up, “I’ve been told that for as long as I can remember.” She turned, started to walk away.

“Grayson doesn’t belong here with you,” Claire said. “There’s a little girl waiting for him. She needs him. You don’t.”

“Sherry Birkin,” Alexia said, looking at her over her shoulder. “I know. As for needing him, you presume a lot about me, Redfield." She turned to face her. "I need Grayson more than you think, and in ways you couldn’t possibly understand.”

“If you’re planning to hurt her…”

“Again with the presumptions,” Alexia said, rolling her eyes. “On the contrary, actually. I may adopt her. I haven’t quite arrived at a decision yet.”

Claire opened her mouth, closed it. “No,” she said. “No, no, no. Sherry deserves better than that.”

Alexia strode toward her, until they stood only a foot apart. “Better than that?” she said, staring at her. “Why do you think I’m less than better?” She smiled. “Because I’m evil? Evil is subjective, Redfield. Its definition changes depending on whom you ask.” She tilted her head, appraising her. “For example, I could say you’re evil for nearly drowning me when I’d done nothing to provoke you, for putting a gun to my head and robbing me of my keycard. I was going to let you live, Redfield, because Grayson asked that of me.”

Claire said nothing. How had she gone from nearly killing Alexia to feeling like a lectured child?

“Sherry,” Alexia continued, “would benefit from my care. I have money and connections. I can give her the best education said money can buy, and, when the time comes, find her a lucrative job with said connections. Would you have her languish in the American foster-care system? If it’s anything like the British fostering system, I can assure you, she’d be far better off with me. But,” and she held up a finger, “that is assuming I decide I want anything to do with Sherry. Although, Redfield, seeing it piss you off so much is beginning to convince me that I should. And there’s something terribly Shakespearean, I admit, about my former rival’s daughter becoming mine.”

“What did you do to Steve?” Claire asked coldly.

“I thought we were discussing Sherry,” Alexia said, raising her eyebrows in amusement. “Regarding Burnside, I simply repaid him in kind for killing my brother.”

“Your brother murdered people, locked them up in a fucking gulag. And you’re gonna sit here and tell me that he didn’t deserve what he got?”

“Careful where you tread, Redfield,” Alexia warned. “My goodwill only extends so far.”

“Fuck you, you crazy bitch,” Claire said through her teeth. “You’re never gonna get Sherry, not as long as I can help it. And when Steve and I get outta here, you’re gonna wish you’d killed us both.”

“I already killed one, Redfield. You’ll follow soon enough.” Alexia shooed her away, then turned and hurried off.


	37. A Knot of Tension

The coordinates Wesker gave them led them to an Umbrella facility a few miles south of the Weddell Sea.

Zipping into her arctic gear, which Jill had found in a locker aboard the plane they’d taken from Rockfort, she disembarked, found herself in the middle of a chilly hangar. “You know,” she said, her breath steaming in the air, “when I said I wanted to visit Antarctica, this wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I’d pictured more penguins, cute postcards, maybe kayaking around the glaciers.”

“Yeah, well, no penguins, postcards, or kayaks here,” Chris said, adjusting his thick beanie and stepping off the plane. “How’s your head?”

Her head ached dully, and she had a painful knob on the back of her skull that throbbed in the cold; so she was grateful for her beanie. “It’s better,” Jill replied. “Still not great, but better.”

“Nothin’ compared to Arklay and Raccoon, huh?” Chris said, grinning.

“Yeah, I’ll take a creepy Umbrella facility in Antarctica over Nemesis,” Jill agreed, crossing the tarmac, careful not to slip on the occasional patch of black ice.

Other planes from Rockfort crowded the hangar, and Jill knew they were from Rockfort because they looked exactly like the plane Chris had flown them here on. There was something creepy, Jill decided, about a bunch of lookalike planes parked in an abandoned hangar, with no passengers in sight.

“Guess they got route-locked like us,” Chris said. “We didn’t even need the coordinates from Wesker.”

“Maybe he gave us the coordinates just in case we found another ride off Rockfort?” Jill said, chuckling. “He _really_ wanted us here.”

“Probably to trap us here,” Chris said. “But if Claire’s here, we’ll have to risk it.”

“Or Wesker lied to get us here, and now the only two people with dirt on Umbrella and him are stuck in Antarctica with barely enough fuel to get us anywhere close to civilization.”

“Also a possibility. But relax, this place probably has fuel stored away,” Chris said. He stopped walking, looked at something off to his right. “Hey, Jill,” and he grabbed her arm and pulled her over. “That a body?”

What might have been a body once was little more than a charred pile of bones, and a guy was gnawing on those bones, his eyes clouded over, pieces of his putrid skin sloughing off like molt and leaving behind raw, inflamed ulcers. The zombie wore a tactical harness, and the identifiers on it identified the man as Rodrigo Raval, Umbrella Security Service, Captain of the 3rd Squad. Dropping the blackened bones, Rodrigo turned to them, slowly climbed to his feet.

Jill shot, and Rodrigo’s head dissolved into a spray of a red, and he sagged to the ground with a groan. She looked at the body—what was left of it anyway—that Rodrigo had been snacking on. “Think it was one of the prisoners?” she asked. “Someone burned them. Definitely wasn’t a zombie, unless they learned how to operate a welding torch somewhere between Rockfort and Antarctica.”

“Could’ve been,” Chris said, and looked around, scratching his forehead. “But I don’t see any ignition sources. No gas canisters or anything, and for this kind of burning? Definitely would’ve required a lot of heat and fuel.”

“Too bad Barry’s not here,” Jill said. “He seems to know a lot about forensics.” She’d never let Barry live down what he’d said about the blood they’d found in the dining room of the Arklay mansion, about how it might have been Chris’s, and how intensely he’d studied it, as if staring at the puddle long enough would have eventually revealed whether or not it belonged to Chris.

“Think Rebecca would be better for this kind of job,” Chris said, laughing.

“I miss that kid,” Jill said.

“Yeah, so do I. But I think she’s happier in grad school.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier in another career.”

“Me too,” Chris agreed.

Through a series of identical maintenance corridors, they found themselves in some kind of atrium with a domed glass ceiling. A handrail wrapped around a kind of mineshaft, and if Jill looked down the shaft, she saw other handrails, other floors, and they went on, down and down,like an infinity mirror. A fiberglass directory, like the kind found in malls, stood in the atrium and displayed the different floors; but the layout was so confusing that it might as well have not been there at all. Even after studying it for a few minutes, Jill couldn’t make heads or tails of it. “Did the researchers seriously just memorize this piece of shit?” she said aloud, shaking her head.

“Not like they got anything better to do in Antarctica,” Chris reasoned, shrugging. He squinted at the directory. “Shit, it’s like one of those unreadable technical blueprints.”

“No kidding,” Jill said. “And Claire—if she’s here, and Wesker wasn’t bullshitting us—could be in any one of these goddamn rooms. There’s like a million of them.”

“Guess we should start lookin’, then,” Chris said. He looked at her. “We’ll cover more area if we split up. I’ll go left and keep goin’, and you go right and do the same.” He traced zigzagging lines on the directory with his gloved finger. “Looks like the floors switchback down, and I think these drops are elevator shafts.”

Jill nodded. “Looks about right,” she said, studying the directory. She pointed at a room that looked easy enough to reach; the shafts fed into it. “Think this is some kinda landing, like an anteroom or something. We can meet up there. It’s on C-4.” Jill grinned. “You can remember C-4, right?”

“Boom, baby,” Chris said.

“You’re fucking lame,” Jill said, laughing. “Anyway, we’ll meet up there. Any elevator will take us to it. Easy enough rendezvous to reach, as long as there’s no extensive damage to the building. But this place looks pretty intact.”

“Got your radio?” he asked.

“No, Chris, I left it on Rockfort.”

Chris stared at her.

“I’m joking,” Jill said. “Yeah, I got it. I’ll keep you apprised of things on my end.”

They split up. She stood in a long hallway lined with doors, and after poking her head in a few, Jill concluded this was where the facility’s administrative offices were located. Further down, she found an elevator, a small sitting area and two vending machines on her right,and an inspection visit frame on her left which contained a yellow sheaf of paper listing the signatures of elevator consultants. The last one had signed off in September of this year, right before Raccoon City.

She thumbed the CALL button and waited, and rode the elevator down to the next floor. As the doors opened, she saw lights flickering. The floor was wet, so she guessed the sprinklers had triggered, or a waterline had burst. Stepping out of the elevator, Jill made her way down the hall, past conference rooms and senior personnel offices. A malfunctioning photocopier whirred and chunked, spitting out a steady stream of papers that cartwheeled to the floor.

A zombie in a custodial suit lunged through a door at her, and she sidestepped, popped a bullet in its head. It pitched forward to the floor, lying face-down on a bed of soggy photocopies, blood pooling under its head, its brains like little islands in a black lake.

Clearing that floor, too (all the floors seemed to loop around, so it wasn’t hard to clear), and turning up nothing, Jill doubled back to the elevator and thumbed down to the next floor.

She opened the channel on her radio. “How’s things on your end, Chris? I’m not finding anything.”

His voice crackled over the frequency. “Nothin’ either. Think I’m in some kinda barracks for the employees.” He paused, as if listening for something. Then, “Hey, Jill? I been hearin’ some weird noises, so keep your eyes open, okay?”

“Weirder than the moans of the undead?” she quipped.

“Hah,” Chris said, “funny. You’re funny. Anyway, I dunno. Sounds… it sounds kinda big.”

“Are we talking seven-foot and bipedal big?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You ever hear a snake? The way they move through grass, I mean. It’s like that. Like a rustling.”

Jill swallowed the lump in her throat. “Don’t tell me there’s a giant fucking snake here, like the one that killed Richard in Arklay.”

“With Umbrella? Who fuckin’ knows. Just keep your eyes peeled.”

“You got it—”

The elevator lurched suddenly as if someone had yanked on its pulley, and it jounced underneath her, threw her off her feet. “Jill?” Chris said. “Jill? You okay? Talk to me.”

“Not now, Chris,” she said, and cut the line. Jill climbed to her feet, and the elevator lurched again, then dropped, sudden and hard, and she tipped over, catching herself on the chromed wall.The elevator rocked, and Jill bolted for the doors, prying them open. Whatever had happened to the elevator—she heard the cables snap, then, and the car tilted hard to the right—had tripped the opening mechanism on the outer doors, and she could see the slick concrete walls of the shaft, a putrid, hot stench assailing her nostrils.

The car was contained within a kind of steel framework, a sort of cage, and there was a beam about a foot in front of her. Jill squeezed through the doors and found purchase on the beam, wobbling, catching herself on a support. The other cable snapped, the governor spun out of control as the cable unspooled, and the car plummeted down, pushing up a rush of warm, foul-smelling air, and vanished into the darkness.

The counterweight sped upwards and hit the ceiling with the impact of a cannonball, a spray of concrete and asbestos raining down on her. Looking up, Jill saw something writhing around: a long, snake-like shadow protruding from a hole in the wall of the shaft like a hairy moray eel.

“Holy fuck,” she said, and pressed herself against the support as the pulley cracked and came down, and had nearly taken off her head.

The eel-looking thing slithered down the side of the shaft toward her. There was a cage-like thing around the counterweight track that looked kind of like a ladder across from her; she could barely make it out in the poor shaft-lighting, let alone accurately judge the distance she'd need to jump. But she didn’t have a choice—it was either try or die.

Swallowing the fear in her throat, Jill jumped and caught a rung, her body whipping from the momentum of her leap, her boots kicking at air. She started climbing as fast as she could, saw the eel-thing creeping closer and closer.

As the eel-thing closed in, Jill’s first instinct was to fire her gun at it; but then Barry was reminding her, in her head, in another routine S.T.A.R.S firearms drill, to never shoot at a flat, hard surface, because the bullet could ricochet. So, once the thing was close enough, she stuck her boot in between rungs and held on tight with one hand, tugging her S.T.A.R.S knife free from the sheathe on her leg and slicing at it.

The thing groaned as if in pain, tried to wrap around her leg. Jill kicked it away and stabbed repeatedly, violently, and the thing groaned again, then began its slow retreat through the hole it had made in the side of the shaft.

Sweating and shaking, Jill wiped the knife on her pant-leg, the serrated blade coated in something that had the planty reek of a crushed stinkbug, and sheathed it. Then she started climbing and did not stop.

Eventually she found a door, and she stuck her foot on the ledge outside it, then the other, and pried the doors open with her hands just wide enough to squeeze through the crack. She landed in a heap on the floor, the tile cool against her forehead, and she had never been happier or more grateful than now to have solid ground underneath her.

She realized, then, that her leg was burning. Sitting up, she noticed that the fabric, where she’d wiped the blade,was starting to burn as if someone had put a lit cigarette to it. Alarmed,Jill quickly shucked off her outer-layer of clothing and tossed it aside. The clothes disintegrated, and her S.T.A.R.S knife with it, the acid chewing through the blade as if it were made of paper.

A weird sadness coiled in her chest, watching her S.T.A.R.S knife melt away. It was like a final punctuation, a period at the end of a sentence she wished would have run on.

Footsteps. At the far end of the hallway was a woman, and she was coming closer. But she wasn’t Claire. Maybe one of the prisoners from Rockfort, she thought, but she looked too rich for prison. She was wearing a dark dress that was almost funny in how anachronistic it looked, like something her great-grandmother on her dad’s side would have worn to a French operetta, and her hair was platinum blonde, made her look like one of those kids from Village of the Damned.

“Interesting that you survived,” the woman said, her accent manicured, distinctly British upper-class. She was unbelievably pale, almost see-through, and her eyes were the color of ice.

“That was you?”

“Alexia,” the woman said, “is my name. I’m the Chief Researcher of this facility.” She paused. “Or was.”

Jill’s throat tightened, and she found herself staring. Alexia? There was no way that this was the same Alexia Grayson had talked about; that Alexia had died at thirteen-years-old, he’d told her, and this woman looked a few years shy of her thirties.

“You’re rather quiet,” Alexia remarked. “You know,” she continued, and she stopped in front of her, staring down her long, thin nose, “it’s usually customary that a name given is given one in return.”

Jill said nothing.

“Fine,” Alexia said, and she kneeled down and began digging through her pockets, finally coming up with her old S.T.A.R.S ID—something Jill had kept as a memento, a reminder to do better—and reading it with the bored interest of someone reading a brochure. “Jill Valentine,” she recited, encyclopedic, “Special Tactics and Rescue Squad, B&E Specialist, Alpha Team. Raccoon City Police Department.” Alexia’s face became unreadable. “You were in the RPD?”

“You can read, right?”

“In several different languages, actually. Answer the question. Humor me.”

“Yeah, I was in the RPD.”

“Did you know Grayson Harman?”

Jill hesitated. This was the Alexia Grayson had spoken about, the one he’d lied about. Then again, she thought, it shouldn’t have surprised her that he’d lied; he’d been fucking Annette Birkin the whole time they’d been together. She thought about telling Alexia that, but decided that she was above all that: Grayson was the past. Still, she answered her. “Yeah,” she said, “I knew him. He was a beat cop. He died in Raccoon City.”

Something in Alexia’s eyes made her uncomfortable. “Did he?”

“There was no way he’d gotten out,” Jill said. “They dropped missiles—and…” She trailed off, and her heart felt like it was in a vise.

“You cared about him,” Alexia said.

“Yeah,” Jill said, “I did.”

“A shame that he died,” Alexia said, tossing the ID into her lap. Then, without another word, she left.

Jill stared at her picture. She’d looked so proud then. 


	38. Coming Together, Slowly

“Your former co-worker is here,” Alexia said to him, as she walked into the drawing room he’d been, because he had nothing better to do—no scheming or experimenting or chasing down nineteen-year-old girls—practicing Chess on a custom Star Wars-themed board the twins had bought him for his eleventh birthday.

“What?” He put down his King piece, carved in the likeness of a cackling Palpatine, and his battered edition of _Chess for the Layman_.

“Jill Valentine.”

Grayson slurped noisily on his mug of coffee, staring at the inert box-set television opposite him, the REWIND button on the VCR still depressed from when Alfred had pushed too hard and had jammed it. Then, “That so?”

“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?”

He shrugged. “I stopped being surprised at things when I found out you were in a tank for fifteen years and became some kinda Poison Ivy knockoff. Ever since, things have sort of just followed their own logic—so I just go with it.”

Alexia’s eyes narrowed. “Jill was an old flame, wasn’t she?” Even when she was trying not to sound jealous, she still sounded jealous. In the same way people were passive-aggressively cordial to people they didn’t like.

“Alexia, can we not do this?”

“Answer the bloody question, Grayson.”

“Yeah, she was. So what? It’s in the past.”

“I’m far more attractive than she is.”

“You are,” he agreed, and hesitated.

“… You’re hesitating.”

“I mean,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “you’re beautiful. All legs and what not. Perky breasts, gorgeous ass. Great accent I’d pay to narrate an audiobook. But, uh...” Grayson trailed off, seeing the stormy look on Alexia’s face. “You’re soft, you know?” he said, finally. He squeezed as if clutching imaginary sponges in his fists. “Squishy.”

“What the bloody _fuck_ is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that Jill went to the gym a lot, you know?”

Alexia opened her mouth, closed it. “Are you calling me flabby?” She sounded as if he’d just insulted her mother, if she’d actually had a mother she cared about.

“Not flabby,” he said, and sipped his coffee. “You’re not fat. Just soft. There’s nothing wrong with soft.”

“I’m going to take that cup and shove it up your—” Alexia stopped, as if someone had just called her name and she was trying to listen to make sure she hadn’t imagined it. “Someone just arrived,” she told him. “In the facility, I mean.”

“Jesus Christ, this place is turning into JFK airport,” Grayson said, rubbing his temple with his thumb. “And, more importantly, how do you even know tha—you know what?” He shook his head, throwing his hands up in defeat. “Nope, not questioning it. This world operates on its own Wonderland logic. Okay, so we have more visitors. What now?” He peered at her. “Can we ask them for a ride outta here, maybe? Or is that against the fucking rules of this stupid B-movie plot? Like in horror movies, instead of running when they get the chance, the teenagers decide to go into the basement. Basically, are we going into the goddamn fucking basement, Alexia?”

Alexia blinked, and her expression was a chorus of chirruping crickets, an unimpressed audience at some shitty one-man show. “You get quite expansive when you’re stressed, don’t you?” she said, after a lengthy pause.

“Fuck. We’re not even married yet, and you’re already driving me nuts. Fuck Spencer’s people and whatever shitty plan you guys concocted. Let’s go hijack this asshole’s plane and get outta here.”

She grinned with white teeth, a perfect supermodel smile. “Good,” she said. “Practice makes perfect, doesn’t it? Learn to live with me now, and the rest of our lives will be smooth sailing, darling,” and Alexia, still smiling, walked over and poked his nose. “Are you able to fly a plane, Grayson?” she asked sweetly.

“… No.”

“Oh?” she said, feigning surprise. “Well! Neither can I. I’m afraid Oxford didn’t offer a degree in piloting.” Alexia pinched his cheek, and said, “We’ll stick to my plan.” She released his skin from her pincer-like hold between her thumb and finger, and continued, “Unless, of course, you fancy crashing into the Weddell Sea—and that’s assuming we even get that far, and don’t hit a glacier beforehand. Or blow up before clearing the hangar.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, rubbing his cheek. “Point taken.”

“Let’s go greet our guest.”

*

Jill finally made it to C-4 (she managed to find a maintenance stairwell that took her there), still shaken from her encounter with Alexia, and she found Chris waiting, leafing through a glossy pamphlet outlining Umbrella’s ESO plan, stock-photo models smiling vacantly at her from the cover.

Chris looked relieved when he saw her. He tossed the pamphlet onto a plastic end-table piled with other pamphlets, and asked, “You okay? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Could say that.” Then she told him what had happened.

“So Harman lied?” Chris said, frowning. “More importantly, why the fuck’s Alexia in Antarctica?”

“Back when we were dating, Grayson let it slip once that he’d spent his childhood in Antarctica,” Jill explained, recalling that evening, how she’d found Grayson in his kitchen with several empty beer cans and half a bottle of expensive scotch that he’d said had been a gift from Alfred, but Jill was sure, at least after she’d found that clump of blonde hair in his shower, had actually been a gift from Annette; though she’d been in denial, then. “I asked him what he meant, and he said it was exactly what he’d meant: he grew up in Antarctica. His dad worked for the Ashfords, who apparently lived and worked here.”

“Think Alexia was working here the whole time?” Chris asked, looking at her. “You know,” he continued, gesturing around them, “before this place got hit by those infected planes from Rockfort?”

“She said she was the Chief Researcher here, so I’m guessing so,” Jill said, and shrugged. “But,” she continued, hesitating, thinking back to that eel-thing in the elevator shaft and how close she’d come to dying, and the cold, almost inhuman look in Alexia’s eyes, “she’s not human anymore. That tentacle thing in the shaft, it was connected to her somehow.”

“Maybe she got bitten, so she injected herself with some crazy shit as a last resort,” Chris suggested, pulling off his beanie and running a hand back through his hair, shiny with sweat. “My sister ran into that, back in Raccoon City,” he explained, jamming the beanie into the pocket of his parka. “Guy named William Birkin injected himself with some virus. Also an Umbrella researcher. He ran NEST in Raccoon City. His name came up a couple of times during my investigation in Europe.”

“Probably,” Jill said, and nodded. “After Arklay and Raccoon City? Nothing surprises me anymore about Umbrella.” She took off her own beanie, ran a hand through her sweaty hair, and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. It was warm in the facility, and she was hot in her insulated layers. “Anyway, you encounter anything weird on your way over here?”

“Nothin’ nearly as exciting,” Chris said, and shook his head. “Zombies, mostly. But if this Alexia chick’s runnin’ around here, I’m pretty sure things are gonna get loud soon.”

“Hopefully we find Claire soon, and we can leave,” Jill said, wanting to be as far from this place, from Alexia, as possible. She knew it was dumb, but Jill couldn’t help but feel aggrieved that Alexia was alive. It was like a stubborn stain—the stain of her time with Grayson, forever ingrained in the fabric of her life, reminding her of the things she’d rather forget had ever happened—that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard she scrubbed.

They took the stairs, after Jill’s impassioned speech of how she’d never set foot on another elevator in this place for as long as she could help it, and they stayed together, after her addendum to that speech in which she’d argued it would be stupid, suicidal even, if they didn’t stick together.

There was a directory of some sort on almost every level of the facility, so they had a pretty consistent point of reference for where they were going. But the lower they went into the facility, the scarcer the maps and the directories became, until they found themselves relying on instinct, signs, and nebulous evacuation plans displayed on glassed-in print-outs.

In an older part of the facility now—Jill knew it was older because the posters here showed the sort of graphic designs that had been popular in the 1970s—they found themselves on a floor that seemed to have been used as a place for Umbrella to store their retired equipment, and where the boiler-room for the facility’s heating system was located. There were several BOW storage-rooms, too, but they were empty, which she was grateful for.

Claire emerged from one of the BOW store-rooms with a young kid, maybe seventeen-years-old, and he looked terminal. “Chris?” Claire exclaimed, smiling ear-to-ear, and she hugged him. Then she noticed her and said, “Holy shit, Jill? You came, too!”

“I wasn’t gonna let Chris go at it by himself,” Jill said, grinning. “We’re partners.”

“I can’t believe the e-mail actually worked,” Claire said.

“Sort of,” Chris said. “Anyway, we’re here now.” He glanced at the sickly-looking kid. “Who’s he?”

“My name’s Steve Burnside,” the kid grimaced, shaking and sweating. “I was a prisoner on Rockfort.”

“Was he bitten?” Jill asked.

“No,” Steve said, and shook his head. “I wasn’t bitten, fuckin’ swear. You can check yourself, you want.”

Chris looked the kid over, then said, “I don’t think he’s lyin’, Jill. I’m not seein’ anything.” He gave Steve another once-over, just for peace-of-mind, then said, “Think he’s just sick. He was on Rockfort, so no surprise. Looks malnourished.”

Jill wasn’t entirely convinced, given her own experiences in Raccoon City; but Chris seemed positive that Steve wasn’t any danger to them, so she nodded and said, “Okay. Considering what we saw on Rockfort? Could be something he caught there.” She glanced at the kid. “How’d you wind up in the BOW store-room, Steve?”

“Crazy blonde bitch,” Steve said, shivering. “Alexia.”

*

When they arrived in the hangar, someone had blown up all the planes, and it smelled of burnt fuel and metal in the hangar, and of snow blowing in from the arctic tundra. The only plane left was a jet-black one that looked like something that belonged in some military’s R&D lab, and it looked unguarded. Not that it mattered, he told himself; neither of them could fly it.

They found a heavy-duty demolitions kit, empty of everything except a crimper, wire-cutters, and a roll of electrical tape. H.C.F was stamped on the hard plastic case of the kit. “Alfred mentioned the H.C.F before,” he told her. “On Rockfort. They were the ones who’d attacked it.”

“I wonder if they’re connected to one of our rivals,” Alexia said, staring at the empty kit. “WilPharma or TriCell, perhaps? But attacking Rockfort is more than a little strange. Had I given the order to cripple our competitors, I would have attacked one of their production facilities, not a detainment center.”

“I think Wesker’s got something to do with this,” Grayson said. “Remember when I’d mentioned he was looking for you?” Something in his gut told him Wesker was interested in Project Darwin, or at least Wesker’s employer was. Wesker had been looking for her, and it was Alexia who possessed the knowledge, and the necessary key, to decipher his dad's research. He shared his thoughts with her.

“Seems the soundest theory,” Alexia agreed. “Rockfort held no real importance to Umbrella, nor does this facility. I'm the only valuable thing in this bloody place.”

“We need to find Wesker,” Grayson said.

“Way ahead of you, darling."


	39. Converging Points

**A Note from Q:**

_I apologize for not updating this story for the longest time. I've started a new job that's had me working 60+ hours a week, six days a week, so I haven't had the time or energy to write. I'll try to get updates out every Sunday, since that's my only day off, but I can't promise anything. The story hasn't been abandoned; it's just going to take a lot longer for me to get new chapters out. Just wanted everyone to know what was up, in case they were wondering why things have been so slow-going. Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll continue to tune in!_

* * *

“You’re not lookin’ too good, Steve,” Chris said.

Steve nodded, a wet, rumbling cough roiling in his chest, and out. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be cool.”

Claire frowned. She’d heard a cough like that before, on a documentary about a man dying from a pulmonary embolism. She touched Steve’s hand, reflexively: _I’m here._ She felt anger, then: a deep down, raw, pressure-cooker-about-to-explode anger. “What did Alexia do to you?” she asked, barely concealing the shaky rage in her voice.

Jill glanced at Steve, and she almost looked sorry, like she knew something Claire didn’t. No, Claire thought, she knew what Jill knew; she just didn’t want to admit it. “Claire,” she said, and put a hand on her shoulder. “We need to keep moving.” Her eyes told her it was too late, and her mouth looked as if it wanted to tell her that, too.

“Stop worryin’ ‘bout me,” Steve said, and hacked like a smoker with an acute respiratory infection. “I’ll be okay.”

“Maybe we should find an infirmary,” Chris suggested, looking Steve over like a concerned dad. But that was her brother—the concerned dad, the chronic worrier. “Might be some meds we can give him. Couldn’t hurt, right?” He looked at Jill. “Remember Arklay? Richard was poisoned, but we managed to help him—”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Jill said.

“That’s a great idea,” Claire said, trying to sieve whatever optimism she could from the confused dregs of her emotions. “It’s better than just sitting here, doing nothing.”

“Alexia might even be able to cure him,” Chris said. “If we can stabilize Steve—Jill and I can find her, maybe talk some sense.”

“There’s no talkin’ sense to that crazy bitch,” Steve said, rubbing his chest and wincing. He coughed again, his face filmed with sweat. “Her head’s so far up her own ass, the only thing she sees is shit. You’d be wastin’ your time with her.”

“Not too mention she turned into some kind of mutant,” Jill said. “Is she even capable of reasoning like a human anymore? Maybe her sentience is like one of those mind-control mushrooms. It’s not really her talking; it’s the mushroom.”

“Even so, it’s worth a shot,” Chris said, shrugging his large shoulders. “If it means we can save this kid’s life? I’m all for it. Worst happens, we negotiate with bullets.”

“I tried that,” Claire said, darting a look between Jill and her brother. “She’s not scared of guns, and they don’t even work on her. I shot her, Chris. A few times. She just kept walking, and her blood? It’s flammable. More she bleeds, more dangerous she gets.”

“Well, shit,” Chris said, running a hand back through his hair and looking to the side, at a potted plant. Then he looked at Jill and asked, “Any ideas?”

“I got one,” Claire said. “Grayson Harman. She’s got him under her control or something. I’m not sure. But maybe you can get to her through him. She listens to him.”

Jill stared, for an uncomfortable stretch of time. Claire imagined her eyes running some kind of x-ray, and felt embarrassed. Then, “She said he died in Raccoon—no, wait. _I_ said that.” She went quiet, then looked at her again. “Is he really here, Claire?”

“Yeah,” Claire said, and nodded. “She did something to him—to his head.”

“Harman was always crazy,” Steve said.

“Well,” Chris said, looking between them, “we can figure it out later. First, we need to find an infirmary or a lab or something, get Steve stabilized. That’s the priority right now. Everything else? Cross that bridge when we get there. The plane’s not goin’ anywhere.”

*

The tank capsule was empty. Wesker clenched his fists, glowering behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses. He hadn’t expected Alexia to be fully awake yet; now his job would be much, much harder.

“I’m negotiating a pay-raise,” he said aloud, turning away from the capsule.

Cables carpeted the floor like some strange rubber fungus, connecting to winking DECservers racked inside rows of modular chassis. Wesker strode across the room, his breath steaming in the air. Cooling fans whirred like jet turbines in their nacelles, circulating the frigid air, and the DECservers chugged and whined and rattled. Hardware as old as that hadn’t been built to withstand this sort of processing power, and it was a miracle it had even lasted this long. But that hardly surprised him; Alexia was a genius, Umbrella’s shining star, and she’d likely employed failsafes and modifications to ensure that the hardware kept running for as long as she needed it to.

Wesker didn’t look forward to dealing with Alexia. He had hoped this job would have been easy, that he could have simply moved the tank while Alexia slept. She’d been a stubborn girl, and Wesker doubted much had changed in that regard. Either he made a very good case for himself and his employer by appealing to her good sense, or hebeat the good sense out of her and took her by force. He, however, preferred that things remained bloodless; Alexia wasn’t the sort of person to submit and cooperate under duress. Wesker couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride; he had been the one who had molded Alexia, who had taken her under his wing and shown her the ropes, shown her how to do things without remorse and second guesses. And she’d taken his lessons to heart, allowed them to concrete into facets of her personality.

“Perhaps the student will finally become the teacher,” he joked, exiting the tank-room.

*

“I thought you’d said you were looking for Wesker."

They were sitting in Alexander’s old laboratory, while Alexia, as if it was just another day at the office, fiddled with microscopes, beakers, and flasks, and scribbled down esoteric equations and notes on sheets of college-rule in a fat rubber binder. She’d even put on a laboratory coat, as if that somehow legitimized her time-wasting. She didn’t reply to him, either.

“Every second we spend in here, wasting our fucking time, that’s another second Wesker’s got to escape,” Grayson said, frowning. He paced the room, loosened the knot on his tie. “When are your people coming anyway?” he asked. The facility had been putting him on edge these last few hours, making him feel vaguely claustrophobic, as if the walls were incrementally closing around him. The nostalgia he’d felt for the place had quickly been subsumed by fear—the fear of never leaving, of never returning to civilization and all its lazy comforts. It started to feel less like home, and more like the last hour at a job—that slow, painful crawl of an hour that came at the end of every shift, made you feel like you’d never leave.

“I have work to do,” Alexia said, finally. “Besides,” she continued, and looked at him, “I already know where Wesker is, darling.” She smiled.

“Right. Your tentacles. They work like snakes, or something? Sense vibrations?” He stopped walking and looked at her. “Anyway, what work? Umbrella seriously got you on the clock right now?”

“Of course they do,” Alexia said, and rolled her eyes.

“Seriously?” Grayson stared, pushing his hands into his pockets. “They seriously got you on the clock?”

“Darling, I know you’re not deaf. Yes, they do.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, and leaned against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. “They don’t cut you vacation time or some shit?” he asked, knitting his eyebrows. “I mean, you just woke up after fifteen years. That’s gotta count for some kinda sick-leave, right?”

Alexia laughed.

“Stop laughing. I’m being serious. Corporations, they fucking suck.”

“It’s my company, Grayson,” she said, looking at him.

“Not right now it’s not,” he pointed out. Then, “Seriously, did they change the benefits package or something? I remember it being pretty generous back in the 80s.”

“It’s still generous, darling. Besides, it’s not as if I need it anyway,” she said, smiling. “I can pay for my own healthcare, vision, and dental, my dear. And as a major shareholder, I can take vacation time whenever I bloody feel like it. It just so happens I struck a deal with Spencer, and if I want to remain on his good side, I need to uphold my end of the bargain.”

“I thought you wanted to throw his geriatric ass outta the CEO’s seat.”

“I do and will, but I need to stay close to Spencer until a ripe opportunity presents itself. The Long Game, Grayson.”

“Anyway, speaking of benefits, I been meaning to bring up mine—”

“Really, Grayson?”

“I’m just fucking with you. But seriously, I deserve a pay-raise.”

“You’re going to marry me. What more could you want?”

“I dunno. Vacation time? Sick leave? Healthcare?”

“Tell you what. When we’re married, you’ll eventually be naturalized as a British citizen, and then you can take advantage of the NHS like everyone else.”

They both laughed. “Sometimes I forget you have a sense of humor,” he said. Then, “So what’s Spencer got you doing anyway?”

“I’ve been working on a little project for him involving the T-Veronica, and a derivative of the Origin strain. It’s all theoretical right now, of course, but it’s proving to be rather promising.” Alexia turned to the little IBM computer on her desk, tapped something out, then ejected a floppy from the drive, which she put into a plastic sleeve.

“You actually gonna give it to him?”

Alexia chuckled, slipped the sleeve into the binder of notes. “No,” she said, and looked at him. “It’s bait, Grayson.”

“Like Alexander’s tea,” he said.

“Exactly,” she replied.

“And what about Wesker?”

“No need to bait him,” Alexia said. “He’s already looking for me. I am the lure.”


	40. Maybe A Bad Idea

They finally found an infirmary, and laid Steve out on the cot.It dredged up memories of her grandfather in France, of him dying in hospice, a Catholic priest by his side, her dad sitting in an overstuffed chair beside his bed, tired and wet-eyed, speaking with her grandfather in hushed French...

“I’ll stay here with Steve,” Claire said, pulling up a chair beside the bed and sitting down on it.

Steve coughed convulsively, rolled onto his side, his face dripping with sweat, and curled into a ball, bunching the sheets between his grimy fingers. He vomited suddenly and explosively, and Claire vaulted from her seat, retrieved the trashcan from the other side of the room and set it down beside the bed.

“Where should we look for Alexia? Harman?” Chris asked.

“Check the mansion,” Claire said. She found a lab coat in a cardboard box beside a plastic anatomical model, mopped up the vomit with it. “You won’t see it on any of the maps,” she added, dropping the soiled coat into the trashcan. “But I can get you there. I’ll write it down.”

“It’s not gonna do you any good,” Steve croaked, leaning over the bed and vomiting noisily into the trashcan. “Alexia,” and he dry-heaved, lay back down on the cot, shivering, “won’t listen to you guys, I fuckin’ promise. She’s insane.”

“That’s why we go through Grayson,” Jill said.

“You’re banking on the fact Grayson gives a shit,” Steve countered, wiping his mouth on the sheet. He looked at Jill with sunken, tired eyes. “He’s just as crazy as that bitch. Only difference? He’s not as obvious ‘bout it.”

Jill wished she could disagree with Steve. Grayson had never been right in the head, she knew, even if it had taken her years, a messy break-up, and a few months of some serious self-examination, to finally realize that. “He’s sick. Mentally, I mean,” she said, finally.

“No shit,” Steve said sourly. “It’s not the kinda crazy you can fix with pills and couch sessions. Alexia and him, they’re made for each other, I fuckin’ swear. Like it was deliberate, you know? Like God woke up one day and said, ‘Hey, remember Adam and Eve? I’m gonna make these two even more fucked up than them!’”

“Alexia mentioned wanting to adopt Sherry,” Claire said, frowning. “You can’t let that happen, Jill. Please.”

“I won’t,” Jill said, meaning it.

“I know Sherry wants Grayson, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea anymore,” Claire said, sitting down again, squeezing a glob of sanitizer into her palm from a bottle, rubbing into her hands. “He needs help,” she continued, wiping the excess sanitizer on her jeans. “But I’m not sure he can be helped. There’s some good in him still, but he’s dangerous. If he gets too close to Sherry, Alexia might—I don’t want Sherry to suffer again. She went through enough in Raccoon City, Jill. You were there. You know.”

“Annette wanted Sherry with Grayson, didn’t she?” Jill asked bluntly.

Claire nodded, an apology in her eyes.

“As much as I’d like to grant a dead woman’s wish,” Jill said, and sighed, “you’re right not to trust him. Grayson’s too far-gone, I think. It’s better if Sherry keeps away from him.”

“You sure it’s for Sherry, Jill, and not because you wanna get back at Grayson?” Chris asked, looking at her.

As much as Jill didn’t want to admit it, Chris wasn’t completely off the mark; she did want to hurt Grayson, to hurt Annette. She knew it was juvenile high-school bullshit, but they’d hurt her bad, and she’d never gotten a genuine apology from either of them. _Probably_ , something with her voice said, _because neither of them had anything to_ _genuinely_ _apologize for, Jill. They loved each other. You were just a third-wheel,_ _always had been._

Her personal hurts aside, Jill also felt genuine concern for Sherry’s well-being, her future. Sherry had lost both parents in a single night, and the only man she’d considered family, maybe had even seen as another father, had, as far as Sherry knew,gone up in nuclear fire. But the last thing Sherry needed was some Umbrella psycho like Alexia playing stepmom; and wherever Grayson went,that limey bitch wouldn’t be far behind, Jill knew—alwayshaunting his steps like some pasty ghost. Or, she told herself, more like a bad habit. Alexia, she thought, was a drug, and Grayson was the dopehead who couldn’t live without her in his veins, without the high she gave him.

“I think I liked him better when he was an alcoholic,” she mumbled to herself, and shook her head.

They left the infirmary with directions to the mansion scrawled on a sheet of fax-paper in Claire’s sloppy cursive-print, a crude map drawn on the back of it.

“You think Alexia will seriously try that shit with Sherry?” Chris asked.

They cut around a corner and walked the length of a hallway stonewashed into high-definition gray-scale by the fluorescent lights. Jill could see every pockmark and crack in the walls, every scuff-mark and chipped tile,every random impact and scratch-mark on the panels of Plexiglass that partitioned off the laboratories.

“I don’t know,” Jill said, finally. “About Sherry, I mean. Doesn’t really fit Alexia’s profile.”

“What do you know about her profile?” Chris asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Not too much,” Jill replied, shrugging. “Grayson, he used to talk about her a lot. So I got curious, did some digging. Didn’t find much, surprisingly. A couple of newspaper clippings from the early 80s, late 70s, talking about how she was a child genius who graduated Oxford at ten-years-old. Some television interviews. You know she was on David Letterman? Crazy. Other than that, she was a member of Mensa, which was how Alexia wound up in Oxford at ten. Didn’t go the traditional schooling route, you know? They administered a bunch of standardized tests, she took them, passed with flying colors. Then, in 1983, there was an article in The Daily Telegraph about her death. Ashfords requested that the public respect their privacy in their time of bereavement, but condolences and flowers were appreciated. Then it just goes dark. Ten years after she died, The Daily Telegraph writes an In Memoriam article for Alexia—Grayson actually has a quote in it—and Times Magazine features her story, with the blessings of her family. ‘A bright star burned out too soon’, or, my personal favorite, ‘a true English rose, wilted before it could bloom’. Bunch of bullshit that turned out to be.”

“Jesus, you really did do some digging,” Chris said, and there was something that almost edged concern in his voice. “But how’s that prove she can’t take care of Sherry? Playing devil’s advocate here, by the way—I don’t actually support the idea of her, and by extension Umbrella, getting anywhere near Sherry.”

“Yeah, well, I was curious, and Grayson was always gone. Too busy fucking Annette Birkin, I guess.” Jill looked at him, continued, “Anyway, reason I say it doesn’t fit her profile? Everything about her smacks of lonerism, Chris. She grew up in a bubble. Too smart to relate to other kids, too young for adults to take seriously. She lacks critical social skills, empathy—the sort of soft skills an adult needs to raise a kid without fucking up their head, Chris. Doubt Alexia has a maternal bone in her body. Her family life, from what I gathered, was severely lacking. Daddy was never around, mommy took off, her grandfather died back in ‘68, and her family in England, the ones who banked on her death for some sympathy points and their fifteen minutes, they were never, far as I know, in the picture.”

Artificial sunlight glared down on them from a high warehouse ceiling. The mansion looked like a theatrical backdrop, and stood across an expanse of hydroponic grass that was so green Jill had almost mistaken it for turf.

“What is it with Umbrella and these fuckin’ mansions?” Chris said, trailing her across the yard, squinting against the lights. “It’s like they gotta wholesale deal from George Trevor.”

“Wouldn’t doubt it.” Jill pulled out her gun and pressed up against the wall beside the door, while Chris did the same on the other side. “Cover me,” she said, reaching over and opening the door with her free hand. A rush of stale air, which smelled of dead flowers and pricey cigars, rolled across the threshold, made her think of funeral parlors and expensive hotels.

She stepped inside, Chris right behind her, their guns pointed forward. A foyer, all polished white marble and glossy wooden balustrades, that wasdominated by an enormous staircase carpeted in worn runners. A chandelier glittered overhead like a cake of melting icicles, gleaming on the antique suits of armor, and the glass showcases of catatonic porcelain girls, dozens and dozens of them,their vacant eyes staring into the middle-distance.

“I fucking hate dolls,” Chris said, beside her, the chandelier-light making the sweat on his face glisten like fresh glaze. “My grandma, she used to have shit like this all over her house. Scared the fuck outta Claire and me when we’d stay over on the weekends. I’d go around and put blankets over the showcases, because neither of us could sleep with all those dolls watching us.”

“I like these cute little anecdotes you sometimes give, Chris,” Jill said, flashing a grin, making her way toward the staircase.

Deja vu crashed over her, sudden and hard, intense in its vividness: she was walking into the Spencer Estate again,and Wesker was telling her and Barry to split up, to look for Chris, because he’d gone missing sometime between the zombie dogs in the woods, and the front doors of the mansion.

“We’ve been here before,” Jill said aloud, seeing now all the familiar details, the sameness of the layout. Some things were different, sure; but at its core, this mansion was the Spencer Estate.

“Yeah,” Chris agreed. “It’s just like it.”

“Like what?” a woman asked.

Jill looked up. Alexia had been standing at the balustrade the whole time, watching them, listening to them talk, and neither of them had realized it. She was nursing a glass of whiskey, her lips curled into a smirk. Grayson wasn’t with her.

“Where’s Grayson?”

“Do you really think,” Alexia said, and knocked back another mouthful of whiskey, “that I’m so stupid, Valentine?” She pushed off the balustrade and, unhurried, walked to the landing, staring down the stairs at them. “He’s not here,” Alexia continued, folding her arms across her chest, her gloved fingers curled around the crystal whiskey glass. “Why would I give you leverage?”

Jill shot Alexia. The bullet blew through her center mass, splattering blood on the family portrait hanging on the wall behind her,but Alexia was still standing there, on the landing, looking more annoyed than hurt, if she’d been hurt at all.

The blood on the portrait sizzled like grease, then burst into flame, the canvas curling and flaking away in embers. Of the three Ashfords in the portrait, only Alexia had been spared, her oil-paint likeness untouched by the fire. Jill couldn’t help but feel there was some kind of omen in that, like a bad card in a tarot reading. “Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system,” Alexia said, finishing her whiskey and throwing the glass aside, shattering it against the wainscoting, “shall we discuss Burnside? That’s why you’re here.”

“You did something to him,” Chris said.

“Aren’t you observant?” Alexia quipped, descending the staircase, sliding her hand along the handrail. “I did do something. I repaid him for killing my brother.”

Jill shot again, pure reflex. That round struck Alexiabetween the breasts, and she dug her fingers into the wound, plucked out the casing as if it were nothing more than a splinter, then casually tossed it aside. It clattered on the marble, glinting a dull brassy-red color in the chandelier-light, and then it sparked, began to melt.

“You’re wasting your precious ammo,” Alexia said, and paused on the bottom step, less than a foot away from them. She took one more step, stood so close to them now that Jill smelled her perfume, and something underneath it that might have been butane. Alexia leaned toward her, smiling. “Only silver and holy water works,” she stage-whispered.


	41. Confrontations, Both Mental and Physical

Before Jill could react, a tentacle burst through the floor, a spray of marble chips pelting her skin, and it wrapped around Chris’s ankle, whipping him to the ground. He mashed his nose on the marble, blood gushing over his upper-lip, and then, scrabbling at the floor in an effort not to be pulled down, vanished through the hole like something sucked down a pipe.

It had happened in a span of seconds, and Jill found herself, alone and stunned, Alexia grinning like a knife an arm’s length away.

“I’m not going to kill him yet,” Alexia assured her, still smiling. “I have plans for you two.” Slowly, like a vulture circling a carcass, Alexia paced around her, giggling, watching her with pale, evil eyes that gleamed with the sort of controlled insanity Jill had seen in the eyes of serial killers. “After I looked at your ID, I did some digging,” Alexia continued, as if they were chatting about the weather. “Umbrella had an entire file on you and Mr. Redfield, as it turns out, Ms. Valentine. Two former S.T.A.R.S members will be excellent candidates for the preliminary phase of Veronica-Origin testing. You, especially. You have valuable antibodies, thanks to your inoculation against the T-Virus.”

Jill watched Alexia in her periphery. Alexia stood several inches taller than her; she was, Jill guessed, at least six feet tall, or very close to six feet tall. “Yeah?” she said finally, doing her best to look and sound undaunted, even though Alexia scared the shit out of her, and she wasworried about Chris.

“You’ve seen some shit,” Alexia said, candidly. “The Spencer Estate. You were one of only five S.T.A.R.S members to escape.” She paused, stopped walking. Up close, Alexia’s face looked seamless and white, like a silicone mask stretched over an android skull. “Well,” she continued, “I suppose only four now, yes? Brad Vickers died in Raccoon City. How did that feel, Jill? Being powerless to stop his death at the hands of Nemesis? I must admit, I’m surprised Nemesis was ever deployed; the project, in my humble opinion, had always been rather flawed.”

“Fuck you,” Jill replied, through her teeth.

Alexia ignored her. “How did Nemesis perform in combat, Jill?” she asked, amused. “Sate my curiosity. The files regarding the Nemesis Project are still under lock and key.”

“If you don’t step back now,” Jill said, evenly, “I will pistol-whip your goddamn fucking skull in, bitch.”

“Your dossier wasn’t wrong. You’ve a violent, reckless streak. A by-product of the Spencer Mansion Incident.” Alexia grinned with too-white, too-perfect teeth. “Losing all of your teammates must have been traumatizing,” she said, and squeezed her shoulder, and Jill flinched, unconsciously, at her touch. “You were a tight-knit group,” Alexia continued, the grin narrowing to a tight smirk. “Wesker sent regular reports to Umbrella about S.T.A.R.S. You became a headcase after the Spencer Incident, Jill. You saw psychiatrists, were put on medication. And then, after all of that, Irons suspended you from duty. Then Raccoon City happened.”

Jill turned to Alexia, meeting her eyes, staring into the depths of them and seeing nothing there but ice. “Don’t assume you know shit about me, you robot-looking cunt,” she said, her tone hard. “I know things about Grayson you don’t, and probably never will.” She, of course, meant Annette; but Jill wasn’t sure if she wanted to bring Annette up. As badly as Grayson had hurt her, Jill didn’t want Alexia to harmhim in retaliation. Jill already had too much blood on her hands—she still blamed herself for Brad’s death, for Richard’s and Forest’s and Joseph’s deaths, for not doing more to combat Umbrella when she’d had more time—and part of her, for whatever reason, still cared about Grayson, even after all of the shit he’d put her through.

For once, Alexia actually looked taken aback. “There isn’t anything you know about Grayson that I don’t already know,” she said icily, narrowing her eyes. “We’ve known each other since we were both infants. You only knew him for, what, a few years?”

“You don’t give a shit about him,” Jill said, watching her, watching her hands—a cop habit. “He’s just a toy to you. Something to play with. I know your kind, Ashford. You’re a spoiled bitch who never grew up, and never will.”

Alexia got in her face, the tips of their noses practically touching, and her eyes burned into Jill’s like lasers. “Don’t,” she warned, her voice smoldering with anger, “assume you know shit about me, Valentine. I love him. I’ve loved him since I was a girl.” There was conviction in her words, and that surprised Jill. But there was something else in Alexia’s words that scared her: she spoke of Grayson in the same way people spoke of their prized possessions. “You will not sit here and tell me otherwise. You’d lost before you’d convinced yourself there was evera competition.” She leaned closer, her voice a harsh whisper. “You know what you were to Grayson?” Alexia asked, her eyes flashing, and she bared her teeth like a dog. “A wet hole, Valentine. Nothing more.”

Jill didn’t let it show that Alexia’s words got under her skin. She smirked instead, thinking of Annette Birkin. “Yeah?” she said, and looked at Alexia. “You can have Grayson, Ashford. Don’t worry. He’ll cheat on you too, eventually.”

Alexia stared as if she expected some kind of elaboration.

“Where’s Chris?”

Then it was Alexia’s turn to smirk, as if something had just dawned on her. “Redfield’s your type?” she asked, raising a pale, manicured eyebrow. “I don’t blame you. He’s quite handsome. But he’s not my Grayson. Perhaps, however, I’ll experiment on Chris first. I could even use your antibodies to slow the degenerative effects of the Veronica-Origin virus.”

Something in Jill snapped, and she screamed in rage, shoving Alexia against the newel and striking her across the face with the grip of her gun. Blood dripped from a gash across Alexia’s cheek, then fizzed and flared into a fire, forcing Jill to spring back.

“So Chris is your Achilles’ heel,” Alexia said, wiping the blood from her face. “Good to know.” She flung the blood at Jill, but she managed to maneuver out of the way just as it ignited with the speed of a matchstick to gasoline. Then something wrapped around her leg, nearly ripped it from her pelvis, and it hurled her to the floor, dragged her across the marble like a ragdoll.

Jill twisted, fired three times at the tentacle, and it released her with a groan of pain, retreating through the hole in the floor. She scrabbled to her feet, her leg aching where it joined her hip, and hobbled past Alexia, half limping, half sprinting up the staircase in an awkward lope-leap. She turned, fired two shots at Alexia.

Alexia climbed the steps, unhurried, sponging up the bullets, blooms of blood flowering across her chest until the entire front of her dress was sticky and glistening with blood. “How many times are you going to shoot me before you realize it’s pointless, Ms. Valentine?” she asked. “They say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again with no change to the outcome. And I’m the madwoman?” She laughed, and her laugh chilled Jill’s blood, turned it to frazil ice in her veins. “I’m not Nemesis or the T-001. I’m a problem that gunfire can’t solve, Ms. Valentine. Unfortunately for you.”

“There’s a seventeen-year-old who’s dying because of you,” Jill said, ducking behind a glass showcase displaying a row of dolls. Her heart pounded against her rib-cage with hummingbird speed. “You save him and let Chris go,” she continued, swallowing the tightness in her throat, “then you can have me, Ashford.”

“Proposing a trade?” Her voice was close, maybe a few feet away.

“Yeah,” Jill said, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “Let Chris go free, cure Steve, and you can do whatever you want with me. I’ll be your guinea pig.”

No answer. Jill turned to lean out from her hiding place, came face to face with Alexia. “You may have yourself a deal,” she said.

Before Jill could say anything, a tentacle curled around her ankle, yanked her over the balustrade, and then down into darkness.

*

Grayson was sitting in an overstuffed Chesterfield, in the middle of _Chess for the Layman_ , when the door to the drawing room creaked open. He put down the book, took out his gun and laid it on his lap, looping his finger through the trigger.

Not Wesker. Alexia entered the room, the front of her dress soaked with so much blood that it no longer looked purple, but black. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, and put his gun away, bolting from the couch and bounding over to her.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Bullets don’t work on me. They’d need a bloody anti-BOW weapon.”

“Like hell you’re okay,” he said, stripping off her dress piece by piece, until she stood there naked, the front of her torso swiss-cheesed with bloody holes. Some had exit-wounds, some still had the bullets rattling around inside her. “Jesus, Lex,” he exclaimed, unable to find any words, feeling the color drain from his face.

Grayson knew Alexia wasn’t exactly human anymore, but seeing this really sharpened the resolution of that reality with such clarity that Grayson couldn’t help but wonder if he was dreaming, that he was still on Rockfort or even in Raccoon City, sleeping off another bender. It was one of those moments where reality became so weird that it was questionable in its realness—like how he’d felt watching Crackhead Joe down at the Black Room preaching about the End Times with such conviction that Grayson had often found himself semi-convinced Joe was actually telling the truth.

“This,” he said, aloud, “is a Crackhead Joe moment.”

Alexia looked at him, confused. “What?”

“This drug addict used to come to the bar I worked at in Raccoon City. He’d preach these weird sermons, then piss on the bar.”

“How does a drug addict relate in any way to this, Grayson?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, shaking his head. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You okay? It hurt?”

“Of course it bloody hurts,” Alexia said, and sat down, wincing. “Just not enough to kill me.”

“Your blood won’t catch fire on me, right? Really don’t wanna burn to death. Hear it’s the worst way to go, next to drowning or dying in the cold.”

“I’d never burn you, Grayson,” she assured him, her lips grazing his in a light kiss. “Not on purpose,” she added, smirking.

Grayson chuckled, then stood up and crossed the room, opening the cupboard. “Good thing dad kept first aid kits in every room,” he remarked, pulling out the bulky white plastic box from behind a crumbling stack of magazines, and a box of spare light-bulbs. He sat down beside her on the Chesterfield, unlatched the box and flipped the lid open. The contents were old, but unopened and sterile, and he figured it didn’t matter anyway; if Alexia could survive multiple shots to her center mass, where all her important organs were, he doubted some old isopropyl and gauze would do much to harm her.

“He always worried about us,” she replied, turning her back to him. “You know,” she continued, gathering her hair over her shoulder and looking at him in her periphery, “this is rather sweet of you, Grayson. Playing nurse. It’s not necessary.”

He rolled up the sleeves of his suit to his elbows, stared at the constellation of exit-wounds on her back, like blooms of crusting poppies, and said, “I disagree.” Grayson unscrewed the bottle of isopropyl, doused his hands and rubbed the cold liquid into his skin, the medical tang of it stinging his nose. He peeled the plastic off a pair of disposable gloves and pulled them on. “This is pretty bad, Lex.”

“It’s unnecessary,” she repeated. “I’ll recover on my own.”

“But probably slower, right?” Grayson peeled the sterile plastic off the medical forceps and cleaned them with the isopropyl.

Alexia sighed. “Lucky for you,” she said, observing him over her shoulder, “I like being coddled on occasion.”

“You like being coddled all of the damn time,” he corrected. “Turn around, please.”

Alexia turned around, her breasts splattered with sticky blood. “Gloves, Grayson? Seriously?” She giggled. “You don’t need to be so cautious. The wounds won’t become infected; the T-Veronica will kill the infection before it even happens.”

“Indulge me, please. You said you like being coddled,” he reminded her, teasing the forceps into one of the wounds, feeling the flesh yield and shiver around it. “Anyway,” he continued, “a good thing you don’t get infections easily, because I’m not a trained doctor. The first aid course in the academy was pretty fucking basic, and I don’t really know what I’m doing right now.”

“Hard to believe you were a bloody copper,” she said, grinning. “Do you happen to have a spare uniform anywhere? We could do some roleplay, once we’re out of Antarctica and in our nice new home, and our nice big bedroom.”

“Get serious, Lex,” he said, focusing on his work. He felt the forceps grasp around something solid, and he extricated the shell with a squelch, dropping it into an ash-tray on the coffee-table. “Lucky these weren’t hollow points. Anyway, might be pieces I can’t reach if the bullet rattled around in you too much.”

“You know that removing a bullet with forceps is generally a terrible idea, and can often lead to worse complications?” she said, giggling as if she found the fact that Grayson didn’t know what he was doing genuinely funny. “But in a strange way, I find it adorable. You’re so earnest, Grayson, and I love it when you pay attention to me.”

“Only you would fucking say something like that,” Grayson said conversationally, freeing a couple more shells from her flesh and dropping them into the ash-tray. “Normal people would’ve never let me attempt this in the first place.”

“We’re anything but normal, dear.”

“Point,” he agreed. “So what happened? Wesker?”

“If it had been Wesker, do you really think I’d be sitting here?”

“Good point. Jill?”

“How ever did you guess?”

“Saw her hit range-dummies in similar fashion. Did you kill her?”

“No,” she said. “I have plans for her and Redfield. I’m keeping them somewhere secure, for the time being.”

Grayson nodded.

“So,” Alexia said, after a few moments of awkward silence had passed, “Crackhead Joe? What sort of life did you bloody lead while I was asleep, Grayson? Goodness.”

“Black Room used to attract all sorts. Had this woman named Tanya would come in every Friday, hair permed like it was 1985. Always ordered an Alabama Slammer and talked about how she used to be a long-haul trucker until her back went and she had to go on disability. Anyway, long story short, one night she pissed off Crackhead Joe, who was a pretty frequent face at the Black Room, and he pissed on her jeans.”

“Why was this man even allowed in the place?”

“He was kinda like our unofficial mascot, I guess. My boss Carl felt bad for him. Both of them were Vietnam guys, but Carl came out okay, whereas Crackhead Joe came out all sorts of fucked.”

“I wish I’d gotten to spend time with you in Raccoon City,” Alexia said, combing her fingers through the dark waves of his hair. “I missed quite a lot, it seemed.”

“You didn’t miss much,” he lied, trying not to think about Annette, not now, and concentrating on his hands. “Only things that changed while you were gone was Raccoon City got worse. Drug problems were everywhere, property values were going down, and gang violence became a huge problem. Back when I was starting out in the RPD, I responded to a scene where a little girl was short in a turf-war between the Latin Kings and the Crips. She was dead before they could load her into the ambulance.” Grayson paused, dropped another bullet into the ash-tray, then said, “Only people who had money were the guys working for Umbrella, and they basically lived in gated communities, away from the rest of the city. Not literally, but figuratively. Their own little bubble. In a way, the outbreak was poetic justice.”

“Umbrella is my company,” Alexia said. “And you’re as much a part of it as any researcher, Grayson. Whether you want to admit it or not.”

“I never said I wasn’t,” he pointed out, looking at her. “I’m no better than the researchers who were complicit in the creation of the T-Virus. I knew about Umbrella’s shady side, but I kept my mouth shut and my head down, because I didn’t want to rock the boat.”

“You’re blaming me for what happened in Raccoon City,” she said flatly.

“Like you said,” he said, “it’s your company, Lex. You knew about the T-Virus and did nothing to expose the company to the public. You could have. Spencer trusted you.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, knitting her eyebrows.

“But it wasn’t just you,” Grayson said, seeing, in his mind’s eye, Annette, Alfred, William, his own father. “Other people were guilty, too. Me included. We all had a hand in what happened in Raccoon City. Maybe you can live with that, but I don’t know if I can.”

“Are you suicidal?” she asked seriously.

“I was, maybe sometimes still am. But no, that’s not what I meant,” Grayson said, and shook his head. He finished his work, peeled off the gloves. “Just that if something happens to me between now and later, it’s karma coming back to bite me in the ass.”

Alexia cupped his cheek; her palm felt like the bottom of a hot pan. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Grayson,” she said, gazing steadily and unblinkingly into his eyes, her thumb rubbing the space beneath his ear, where it joined the corner of his jaw. Her wounds, now that he’d removed the bullets, started to heal, the flesh and muscle slowly knitting together like some grotesque fabric. The wounds, where the bullets had gone through completely, had mended: smooth white flesh under a black crust of blood.

“You can’t guarantee anything, Lex,” he said.

She pressed her forehead to his, and her warm breath rolled over his skin. “This,” she said, staring at him, “I will guarantee.” Alexia slid her arms around him, pulling him into an embrace, and her skin felt feverish and hot all over. Her internal temperature must have been several degrees beyond what was considered fatal, Grayson decided; she was burning up, on fire. “We’re going to get out of this place in one piece, once Wesker and the others have been dealt with. Then we’re bloody holidaying in Italy, on the Amalfi Coast, and perhaps we’ll shop around for a property to winter in when the Arklays are too cold.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve really thought this all out,” he said.

“That’s what I do. I think, often too much,” she said.

“But the Amalfi Coast?” he said, looking at her. “You’ll burn alive in the sun, Lex. Like a vampire. You don’t tan. You just boil.”

“That’s what sunscreen is for, my dear,” she said, and kissed him, and her saliva burned his lips. “But,” she continued, “we’ll focus on the present for now.”


End file.
